


The Taste of Red

by seelieunseelie



Category: Carry On Series - Rainbow Rowell
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood Drinking, Bookstores, Kinda, M/M, Post-Canon, References to Depression, University, background DeNiall, background Trixie/Keris, not a lot but there's some drinking, vampire stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:41:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28322523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seelieunseelie/pseuds/seelieunseelie
Summary: Two and a half years post-Watford, Baz is in the humiliating early stages of starting over and dealing with the effects of a vampire-related disease. He could handle it, it’s under control, if only a run in with Simon didn’t result in an uneasy truce that puts them back in contact all over again.
Relationships: Tyrannus Basilton "Baz" Pitch/Simon Snow
Comments: 45
Kudos: 100
Collections: Secret Snowflake 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [avenging_cap](https://archiveofourown.org/users/avenging_cap/gifts).



> When I got the email with my prompt for the server exchange I was sooo excited because the entire list of prompts fit an AU I already knew I wanted to write. Which is why I maybe possibly went totally over-board. This is chapter one of a fic that will be 5 chapters ::::) 
> 
> Before reading, here’s what you need to know: in 8th year Simon and Baz don’t get together and Simon deals with the Mage on his own. At the beginning of this fic, they haven’t seen each other since the beginning of Christmas break that same year.

Baz goes hunting on a neat pattern. The sweet spot is every other night, though he can usually get away with it if he goes every third night. Every fourth night at a push, but he’s learned to never push it unless it’s an emergency.

  
Lately it feels like going every other night is a push. It was a slow process, something that seemed at first like his body showing the rotten softness of his emotions post-break up with Daniel. He would wake up in the night from it and that hadn’t happened since he was fifteen, when he’d figured out the ideal hunting pattern. He could never go back to sleep after waking up with hunger pains, so he did what he always did: he prowled the shadows, and glutted himself on the bitter blood of rats. Over the last month he’d been reconciling with the fact that this would be a nightly occurrence, and if he ever wanted to get any sleep, he’d better take care of the thirst before he went to bed.

  
He hoped if he just cried over the breakup already, then maybe the hunger would abate, but Baz learned even younger than fifteen how to keep his misery far from the surface, in a dense terrible core he had no intention of unearthing. It was easier to succumb to the thirst (or be proactive, depending on how self-flagellating he was feeling at the moment) than to cry it turned out.

  
He’s out hunting again tonight, somewhere wooded between Fiona’s and Hampshire. It’s a hiking area he’s stopped at plenty of times on his commute, but he’s not always able to make time for the drive. But it’s peaceful and beautiful here, especially after dark. His sensitive eyes drink in the lush greens, purples, and blues of the woods, and his ears drink up the busy nighttime chatter of insects and birds. The moon is at its zenith, so the woods open to him in a trembling swell of detail.

  
A deer laps at stream not too far away from Baz. He can hear him, his breath ghosting against the quickly moving water, the tender pulse of blood behind its fur. If Baz breathes in (as he does now) with his mouth open, he can taste it on the breeze.

  
Baz calls the deer to him with magic. The deer kneels, with his liquid black eyes blinking drowsily, right at Baz’s feet. He holds the deer’s face in his hands, turning it so that he can drop his lips to the deer’s jugular.

*

Baz started dating Daniel because he looked and acted nothing like Simon Snow. They met at a seminar their second year at LSE. He always looked a little bit like he was laughing at an inside joke, or (more and more by the end) like he’d just thought of a nasty joke directed at you. There was little to remind Baz of Simon, except for how much Daniel did not at all resemble Simon. He shouldn’t’ have thought so much about Simon, but he did before, throughout and after their relationship. Every time they crossed a new threshold, he couldn’t seem to stop himself from thinking how he’d always fantasized doing this with Simon, and now he was doing it with someone else entirely.

  
Someone who wasn’t even a mage, much less a vampire.

  
Not that he would ever date a vampire.

  
At first it relieved him of the burden of introducing Daniel to his family, since he’d likely be disowned for: A. Dating a Normal, B. Daring to date another man in public and then C. Subjecting his family to the knowledge of both. But, over time it became clear that Daniel wasn’t interested in being introduced to Baz’s family anyway. Daniel liked their relationship kept to furtive sweaty encounters late at night. (Always at Baz’s, which was technically Fiona’s. He’s lucky she sleeps like the dead and is out in Hungary or Romania hunting vampires half the time. He never once saw Daniel’s apartment in the year they dated.) When he thinks back over the whole sordid thing, he’s embarrassed he thought their relationship meant anything more than what it clearly did.

  
He’d been physically attracted to Daniel, since Daniel was very objectively, conventionally attractive. There wasn’t anything headier there, however, though he’d wrung it for every drop of romance or sentimentality that he could. He wanted it to over-write his feelings for Simon so badly, and prove to himself that he hadn’t missed his chance to be slaughtered by the Chosen One.

  
He really shouldn’t have been surprised Daniel elected to end their relationship.

*

Fiona happens to be in Budapest tonight, and will be for the next month, so when Baz gets home after midnight, only the cat, Siouxie, greets him. She comes running out of the dark of the (probably from sleeping on his pillow, exactly where she’s not supposed to), howling for him to pay attention to her, and give her treats.

  
He picks her up, which she allows with rumbling purrs and chirps, but she quickly starts wriggling to be put down. Once her paws touch the ground she goes running off again. So much for Baz’s plan to force her to cuddle with him for at least five very dissatisfying and uncomfortable minutes for them both.

  
Siouxie pops up again while he’s brushing his teeth. (He pops his fangs while he’s brushing. It’s the only time he ever looks at them. There aren’t vampire dentists after all.) She jumps onto the bathroom counter, and meows at him balefully for treats. He doesn’t hurry, since he cares about his dental hygiene, but he picks her up and carries her to the kitchen once he’s done flossing.

  
It’s his fault, really. He started giving her treats when he came back from his nightly blood drinking, since he thought it seemed like she felt left out of the hunt. The little bit of processed meat he offers her seems like poor substitute, but she accepts it eagerly before disappearing into the large empty darkness of Fiona’s flat once again.  
He has to get ready for tomorrow, since it’s his first day of classes tomorrow - his first day of classes at a school of his choosing. He’ll study what he chooses (English and French literature), and he’ll become the poor leech on society his father always feared he’d become.

Fiona says his father will come around.

  
But Baz knows that’s code for, “If you don’t bring it up again, he won’t either, until this is compressed into dense pellet of unease to be added to the pile.”  
It’s also his first day of his first job, at a bookstore - and that’s what he’s nervous for. He hadn’t considered getting a customer service job before he made the decision to transfer out of his program at LSE.

  
To compensate for the nerves he wasn’t acknowledging, he spent an hour picking out his outfit for the day. He opted for a black jumper, with a striped v-neck collar and a small golden embroidered bee over the left chest, green-black trousers, and a crisp black button up shirt to go under the jumper. Sober and professional, but luxurious.  
He gets in bed even though he’s not tired. He can feel the blood coursing through his body, and all it makes him think is how if he doesn’t slow it, how much faster he’ll need to drink again. But then, that’s how it’s always been lately. Already he feels the prickle of thirst at the back of his throat like a phantom. Just when he’s decided to try wanking himself asleep, Siouxie jumps onto his stomach, killing the libido of self-loathing brewing in his gut. She always chooses the wrong time to cuddle, but he pets her and coos at her because she’s warm, and he can admit to her and her alone, that he’s lonely.

* * *

It’s been several years since Simon’s life as he knew it ended, and things were okay so far. Not great. A lot better than they’d been since the first two years out of Watford. He’s really only been at equilibrium since last spring when he started therapy again and got a job at Babette’s Botanical Landscaping. He’d never had a job before, not one that he got paid for, or that he had to work to get (because he wanted it, and it hadn’t been foisted on him). He didn’t even know he wanted this job until he was on the interview, and found himself over-sharing about his childhood in care and Babette told him she had as well.

  
He’s getting ready for work now. It’s four in the morning, so both Penny and Shepard are fast asleep (they met Shepard, the cursed, abnormally chipper Normal, on a post-Watford trip to America that went typically awry). Simon’s practiced being quieter in the morning since living with Baz, but he has to be conscious, at this early even he’s not fully awake. It takes him at least fifteen minutes before he remembers to tread lightly and not slam doors - but that’s mostly because Penny shouts at him through her door. He tip-toes around the apartment pulling on his work trousers and and boots, gathering his lunch, like a cartoon cat burglar.

  
He also has to spell his wings and tail in place for the day. His magic hasn’t returned, but Dr. Wellbelove was able to forge a magical device, a ring, with a glass gem, forged with blood magic - so that Simon is able to cast his own glamour all day long. It’s nice. He can’t cast any other spells with it, but at least he has some autonomy, and he doesn’t have to make a decision so drastic as getting the wings and tail removed. Not yet anyway.

  
It’s all blue out on their street when he gets downstairs, and out to where Babette’s dark green truck is idling. She beams at Simon all rosy-cheeked, like she always does. She’s short, but wide with tree trunk arms, tree trunk legs, and a midsection one part muscle, one part bosom, and one part beer belly. Simon doesn’t doubt that she could bench-press him, and he’s never been this well-fed. The row of earrings down each ear winks at him, and her bristly silver crew cut gleams in the early morning. “‘Morning, Simon! Don’t you look fresh as a daisy.”

  
“Not as fresh as you,” he says, voice still scratchy with sleep.

  
She laughs as she pulls away from the curb.

*

This week he’s working with Babette on Penny’s university. It could be a big contract for Babette, who mainly does residential homes in the suburbs, but for the week they’re just reworking one part of the city campus. Penny says it’s near the Language Arts buildings, where she spends most of her time, so they’ve planned to meet for lunch while he’s there - which is sadly a novelty these past few years.

  
He has some other friends now since he started his job, friends aside from Penny and Shepard. He considers his boss, Babette, a sort of friend, and he’s on mostly good terms with all his coworkers. They go out for quiz nights at the pub twice a month, and there’s a kickboxing class he’s started attending with a couple of his coworkers. None of them are mages, but then he’s not a mage anymore either (even if he still has wings and a tail most of the time). He gets the sense though that he makes them uncomfortable somehow, the way he’d make the kids at the care homes uncomfortable. Maybe they can still sense the magic he once had, like a residue - just that he was magical at one point in time is repellent enough. That’s all right. It doesn’t seem like it bothers Babette, and in any case he has Penny and Shepard, even if he doesn’t have much else.

  
The sky is brightening into a dishwater sunrise, though the streetlights haven’t shut off yet, it’s that dark still. Simon and Babette unload the truck, work in silence for most of the morning, while they excavate a strip of dead grass in front of some administrative building. Babette whistles through her teeth tunelessly, and tries to get Simon to guess the song. She eventually tells him what song it was, but he didn’t know it anyway.

  
Before it’s yet eleven it’s started to rain. Not forcefully, but enough that it would be a bad idea to continue, and they part ways; Babette back to her office, and Simon to wait around for Penny’s class to let out. He decides to walk around the campus, and then walks in a sort of spiral going out into the surrounding city.

  
The rain’s picking up though, and he ducks into a bookshop. Penny’s probably still in class, but he sends her a text anyway, just to see. He’s hungry, even though he ate all his snacks on his walk. He’s tempted to find something more to eat while he’s waiting, but he decides on a whim to take a look around the store. One of the things he’s been talking about with his therapist is the concept of doing things just for fun. Things like hobbies. He’s never been much a reader, but that was his life before, when his life was a blur of fight, flight, or freeze.

  
It’s as Simon’s looking over a table display of banned books, when he sees him, standing at the register of the bookshop. The tableau is so utterly confusing, that Simon just stands there staring with his mouth hanging open. He feels his neck getting hot and sweat prickling at his hairline.

  
Baz is behind the register, with a man who looks like he’s demonstrating how the register works. But that can’t be right. Why would Baz have a job? And why would he have a job as quaint as this? Don’t blokes like Baz just get jobs as brokers at daddy’s investment firms or some bollocks position managing daddy’s estate or whatever the fuck? Baz is supposed to be working towards becoming a corrupt politician, and not… customer service, apparently.

  
Simon ducks behind a shelf so he can observe while concealed. He picks a random book off the shelf in front of him to hold so no one hassles him, but he keeps his eyes trained on Baz.

  
He looks different. Simon’s actually surprised he recognized Baz so quickly. His hair’s different, longer. In school it never grew much longer than past his chin, but now it hangs in soft waves around his shoulders. His expression is all wrong. He smiles at something the other bloke says, a nervous sort of smile.

  
Simon steals a look at the bloke next to Baz - maybe he’s evil too. He’s wearing a black turtleneck, and round little wire framed glasses. He looks a little older than middle aged, with male pattern baldness, and an impressive set of jowls. He laughs at something Baz says, which is very suspect in itself. Maybe they’re plotting something together.

  
A woman steps up to the register with a stack of books, and Baz steps forward to start scanning her books.

  
It doesn’t make sense. What the fuck is Baz up to?

  
He steps up in line behind the woman getting her books rang up. It’s taking forever. Baz keeps shooting the woman tense smiles, as the other bloke explains something to him. The woman seems to be getting impatient too. She’s literally tapping her foot. Simon’s just about there himself, but he prides himself on his politeness to customer services workers - even if that customer service worker is Baz. Maybe not. He hasn’t decided how he’s going to play this.

  
Finally the woman steps away, and it’s Simon’s turn. Baz turns a smile to Simon, but then his expression subtly shifts. His eyes are like bullets, his little customer-service smile becoming faint and then turns into a sort of rictus as he struggles to maintain its friendly edge.

  
“Find everything you were looking for today?” says the man next to Baz. His smile is perfectly warm. His name tag says “Thierry” and then below that it says “Manager.”

Simon glances back over at Baz, and tries to answer while processing the fact that Baz’s badge doesn’t have his name, but it does say “Trainee.” “Uh, yes. This is what I came here for.” He drops his book onto the counter, still openly staring at Baz.

  
“A coloring book,” Baz says. His expression is blank, but the gunmetal of his eyes is flashing. Simon’s pretty sure Baz is thinking about killing him. Baz’s nostrils twitch, and a hint of a sneer moves over his lips. Anyone else would think Baz is a normal human, his expression perfectly mild. But Simon knows Baz better than anyone, even if it’s been a few years. He can feel the hatred lazering into him.

_Right back at you, mate_ , Simon tells Baz telepathically. _I’m onto you._

  
“Yeah.” Simon sticks his chin out at Baz. “They’re fun.” He hasn’t done one since he was in care, but now he’ll make sure to do this one just to spite Baz.

  
“Oh, yes. I hear they’re quite relaxing.” Baz’s voice is velvety.

  
“Why don’t you take this one too, Basilton,” says Thierry, as he blithely cuts into their psychic feuding.

  
Simon raises his eyebrows, as Baz’s expression completely shutters. His eyes go all matte. He says, “Of course.”

  
Simon didn’t come up with a clever way to interrogate Baz before coming up to the register, but he doubts all the fore-planning in the world wouldn’t prepare him for this. He’s so rarely seen Baz have to learn how to do something, something he may not be inherently good at, that the novelty of this experience is shriveling all his righteousness into a useless husk of… something. Secondhand embarrassment maybe. He almost feels like he should avert his gaze. His face and neck are flushing as he watches Baz pick over the keys of the register, a line of concentration between his brows. Simon slides a very crumpled and slightly damp pair of tenners across the counter so he can avoid the awkwardness of touching Baz’s hand.

  
Thierry has to intervene to finish out the transaction, explaining in a quiet, patient voice how to send the receipt to print. Baz won’t look at Simon, and Simon is relieved.

  
“Enjoy the coloring book,” Thierry says cheerfully. He sticks a little paper bookmark with the bookstore’s logo on it in the inside flap.

  
Simon accepts the book, and stiffly replies, “You too.” He shakes his head. “I mean. Cheers.”

  
He turns, and all but runs away.


	2. Chapter 2

Penny doesn’t react the way Simon had expected when he told her of Baz’s whereabouts. He’d paced furiously around her campus, almost jogging. But then his stomach started hurting because he was hungry and also possibly because he was so full of adrenaline and confusion. The first thing out of his mouth, once she was finally let out of class, was, “I just saw Baz! Working at a bookstore!”

“Uh huh,” she said through a sigh. “Sounds highly suspicious.”

“Penny, I’m serious.”

“Look, Simon, can we at least eat first?”

They relocated to one of the on campus cafes. He tried to bring it up a few times while they waited in line to order, but Penny kept holding a hand up, cutting him off each time.

She doesn’t let him get in one word about Baz until they’re seated with their tea and sandwiches, which means Simon has to stand there practically quivering with the effort it’s taking to not talk about Baz.

Even once they sit down she doesn’t let him talk until they’ve both had a bite of their respective sandwiches. His is really good, so he takes another bite.

“Before you get started,” Penny says, “I’d like to remind you we have a rule about talking about Basil.”

“What?” Simon splutters around his mouthful.

Penny wipes a speck of sandwich off her cheek with a dully irritated expression. “Well, go on, what happened when you saw Baz at the bookstore?”

“First off, I think it’s fair if we lift the limit on talking about Baz since this is the first time he’s been seen since we were at Watford.”

“What, like he’s been missing and you found him?” Penny raises an eyebrow at him. It’s weird that Penny and Baz can do that. How is it that they have even this in common? Simon can’t manage it. He’s too embarrassed to admit to anyone that he’s tried to do it himself before but he can’t get one brow to go up at a time. He can’t wink either. He can wiggle his ears, but that just makes him look like a berk.

“No, I mean — Pen, you know what I mean. We haven’t seen him for, like, three years and all of a sudden he shows up, and he’s working at a bookstore. Pen, you should’ve seen him, it was so weird. He wasn’t even the manager, he was learning how to use the register.” 

“I’m not following what’s bad or suspect about that,” Penny says. “Did you talk to him?”

“Yes, he said he heard that coloring books are relaxing,” Simon says quickly, with the intent of getting back to his original point: Baz working at a bookstore is unnatural. It’s basically an act of open hostility, as far as Simon’s concerned. To think if he hadn’t stopped at that bookstore - he might never have uncovered Baz’s devious plot. He still hasn’t technically, but it’s only a matter of time now.

“What?” Penny interjects, looking baffled.

“I bought a coloring book,” Simon explains. He sets down his sandwich because this is serious. “He was pretending to be all polite, but you should’ve seen the look in his eyes, Penny.”

“Okay, Simon?”

“Yes?”

“You’re about to hit capacity on the subject of Baz.”

“Penny, no, this is serious. Do you think the Coven know where he is? Or what he’s up to?”

“Hmm, that’s certainly food for thought,” Penny says before promptly changing the subject entirely.

  
  


*

  
  


Shepard isn’t much help either. When he gets home, Shepard is making lunch for himself (he works from home as a liaison for the Coven, and he works from home half the time. He writes a lot of emails when he’s not professionally befriending dangerous magical fauna.) when Simon gets in the door. He’s definitely a more enthusiastic listener, and Simon has the rare satisfaction of describing his history with Baz for context. But when Simon pauses, a little breathless (he’s been pacing and gesticulating furiously throughout this mostly one-sided conversation), Shepard launches into a series of questions that are completely irrelevant.

“Just curious, did he bare his fangs at you when you were at the bookstore?” Shepard says, steepling his fingers in front of his face.

“What? No, it was full of Normals in there. Plus, you know he could get in trouble if it was full of Mages anyway.”

“But what if it’s a vampire bookstore?” Shepard says.

Simon’s about to dismiss it, but he doesn’t have any other theories. “Maybe,” he allows.

“You’ve seen his fangs, though, right?” He drags a notebook towards himself, and flips open to a blank page.

“Yes,” Simon says haltingly. “I mean, I’ve seen that his cheeks get sort of full when he has a nightmare.”

Shepard’s eyes widen at that. “Woah, that’s crazy.” He scribbles furiously, mouthing the words, “Nightmares make vamps thirsty question-mark.”

“Anyway, what I’m trying to figure out is how working at a bookstore could be used for nefarious purposes. I was skeptical at first when you said it could be a vampire bookstore, but we can’t rule that out yet.”

Shepard leans back in his chair, draping one arm over the back of the chair. “Here’s my question,” says Shepard then. “Does this mean that it’s possible to be both a vampire and a mage? Wouldn’t being a vampire cancel out being a mage?”

“He’s both,” Simon says. He’s growing a bit impatient, if he’s being honest. He should’ve expected this, that Shepard would be more interested to hear whatever Simon could tell him the zoological aspects of Baz, and not the more pressing question of Baz’s motives. “Which is why he’s so dangerous,” Simon continues, in a vain attempt at getting this back on track.

“Oh, totally, I can imagine. There’s almost no official, documented information on vampires within the mage community, it’s fascinating. You’re probably the only mage this side of the pond with real inside information as to what a vampire is like. Do you know if he needs to be invited inside in order to enter a building?”

“I don’t know.” Simon grips the hair at his temples. “Shepard, this is serious.”

Shepard is jotting down some notes and grinning. What is he even writing notes _of_? They haven’t fleshed out a single halfway decent idea of what’s going on with Baz, and he’s writing notes and grinning. “Very serious, my dude.”

* * *

  
  


The moment Simon is out of the shop, the pressure building in Baz’s chest rends into pieces. For a mortifying moment he thinks he might actually cry, but he doesn’t. Thierry doesn’t even seem to notice that anything unusual has happened. Baz can’t seem to follow Thierry’s instructions all morning, but luckily it’s his first day so he gets a pass.

He’d almost forgotten where he was, that he was a new employee, and that this was a job he very much needed. It was as if, for a second, he and Simon were eighteen, seventeen, sixteen again, and the object of the game was to get Simon’s attention and keep it. And then he remembered where he was, and he had to ring up Simon’s ridiculous coloring book, even though he still hardly had a grasp of the cash register and it’s labyrinthian and dated point of sale software. He couldn’t look at Simon from that point forward, and only glanced up once the door slammed behind him. That had been bad.

He can’t even go home to spend the day mentally categorizing everything different and the same about Simon’s appearance, to be done in tandem with a thorough analyzation of the contents of their encounter. He has to go to his first day of classes and concentrate at least partially, and thinking about Simon takes up more than its share of his attention. He’s not used to having fresh material to mull over anymore - he used to be quite good at multi-tasking.

The trouble is that he doesn’t have much of a choice either way. As he’s walking the short distance to campus, his mind is already away from him.

Simon had looked good, better than he remembered. Better than he’d ever looked at Watford. He looked healthy, filled out. His skin glowing like a peach, dotted with more freckles than ever. He had one on the edge of his top lip now that would’ve driven Baz madness if it’d been there at Watford. He wasn’t sure that wasn’t exactly what was happening right now. The phantom of his scent was haunting him, the richness of his blood.

  
  


*

In fact, what occurs to Baz by the time he’s driving out to his hunting spot, is now that Simon knows where he works should he worry about Simon returning? It’s what Baz wants, but somehow he doubts Simon would come back to sweep him off his feet - not if their fifth year at Watford is anything to go off of.

Simon has always been right to be suspicious of Baz, in a way. Here he is, on his nightly hunt to sustain his growing appetite for blood. Simon was never able to prove Baz was a vampire, but they both knew Simon didn’t need to get his hands on tangible proof, as long as they both knew.

But why did Simon have to show his face now? Now, when he wore all his short-comings on the outside, and not firmly and only in his most interior? This would’ve been a lot easier a year ago. At least then he could’ve pretended he was better than Snow. Now they both knew Baz was pathetic.

That night he plunged into the woods, biting into the darkness, and sucking out the life like marrow. He took it all out on the night, the secret things moving beyond mortal eyes, and he crushed it into his mouth.

* * *

  
  


As the following day passes, Simon anxiously ruminates on Baz’s scheme. He’s a bit rusty from this kind of mental strategizing, and he’d forgotten how it felt, how it narrowed his focus to a knifepoint. His senses feel heightened, as if he can see more detail in the early morning when Babette picked him up, scent more clearly the smell of exhaust, cigarette smoke, and wet pavement of the city around them. He’s impatient to be done with work, but since it doesn’t rain that morning, they work into the afternoon, and are joined by the rest of the crew, where the atmosphere becomes boisterous. He usually savors this time. He likes the social parameters that work provides, where he has a set limit on how much time they spend together, and what they can talk about while on the job. And then he gets to go home.

But today he’s quiet while he works. He bristles at the attention that’s getting him, since he’s never chatty, even if he is usually listening in with a smile or a laugh every now and then. Today he’s stony, keeping his shoulders back to the conversation going on between his coworkers.

“All right, Simon?” Babette says, sitting heavily beside him on their lunch break. He sat on a bench apart from the rest of the crew so he could focus on Baz without interruption.

Simon nods at her, smiling tensely, and scoots down the bench a bit. He knows she probably wasn’t going to bump into him, but still. Seems polite. “Hey.”

“You seem a bit…” she drifts off, then mimes a comically surly expression at Simon.

“That supposed to be me?” he says, cracking a real smile now.

She shrugs, one shouldered. She’s pretending to not want to smile, but her dark eyes are glittering. “You’re a bit broody, is all. Nothing wrong with that, but I thought I’d check.”

“I’m fine,” he says. “Tired.”

It’s true. He hadn’t slept well the night before, he’d been up so late coming up with ideas of what Baz could possibly be up to well into the night. None of them seemed particularly compelling in the light of day. In fact his theories grew more and more outlandish the later it got in the night. He wasn’t used to staying up late anymore. 

“Okay.” She smiles. “I’ll take your word for it.”

She stays there for the rest of the lunch break, engaging him in small talk. When he first started working for Babette last spring he appreciated her interest in him. She reminds him a bit of Ebb actually. But right now he could barely give her a straight answer to any of her gently probing questions, not when his head was a nettle patch of question marks, with Baz’s silhouette punched through the middle.

* * *

  
  


It’s dark out when Baz sees Simon again. His guard is down, more so even than it had been the day before. He’d gotten to the end of his second day of work at the bookstore, Enormous Eye, and it had gone much more smoothly than his first day. He met two of his coworkers, who also were studying at his university.

He’s already given up on the idea that Simon will show up again, when it happens. He’s already spent the day convincing himself to stop expecting it, he’s only setting himself up for disappointment. And to what end? The most he could hope for would Simon ruthlessly stalking him, and they aren’t fifteen anymore.

In fact, by the end of the day, he has a more immediate concern than Simon’s hypothetical stalking: his craving for blood. Yesterday it had been manageable, since he started the day at Enormous Eye, and his class had let out before the cravings became too acute. He’d been back home before he had to hunt.

It came on slowly. It was busy at the shop, and he was still a bit shaky, so his attention was divided anyway. A crush of students surged into the shop shortly before closing, and the air became thick with heat, so that it lapped viscously against his sensitive nostrils, against his lips. Each customer moving towards him in line, was like a wave. Each human’s pulse _lub-dubbed_ hypnotically. His eyelids grew heavy, venom dropping, his breath coming in shallow drags. It was an effort to not give it away, that he wasn’t a person, when internally it was so very evident. But he’d always gotten away with it before, and he did again today.

Somehow he gets to the end of his shift. Somehow he makes it through Thierry counting out his drawer, gets through an awkward round of good-byes to his coworkers, and puts on his jacket and actually somehow gets through the door and starts walking at a clip towards the nearest tube station. He’s trying not to run, since he’s trying to not look like a lunatic, even if he feels like one. The cool autumn air should shock him awake a little bit. That’s what he’d hoped, but instead it’s like a magnifying glass, drawing the rich scent of blood to him with crystalline clarity, through walls and windows, across city blocks. He’s surrounded.

He’s lucky no one’s around. That’s how he feels when he casts a glance over his shoulder, just on a subconscious impulse. But, there’s Simon, following him. He’s half a block behind him, keeping a measured pace. He’s wearing the dark green canvas jacket and work pants he was wearing yesterday. 

He turns around and picks up his pace a little. He definitely can’t start running now, even though the urge to is acute. He can’t let Simon catch up. He’s never caught up before, not unless Baz has let him, and he’s not about to tonight.

He’s approaching the lit up tube entrance and he makes the impulsive decision to bypass it. It’s too bad he can’t turn into a bat, and metamorphosis spells are tricky in the best of circumstances. He has a cousin who accidentally turned her top half into a black lab, and she’s still out there roaming around somewhere as half dog, half family embarrassment. He idly wonders where he ranks in his father’s eyes - surely it’s somewhere close to his half-dog cousin.

He’s taken a sharp turn into a park. The street lights are off, but Baz can see just fine. That should be enough to throw Simon off his tail. He can see all the ink drop blue and pearly grey of night, the sable color of the dead leaves, skittering across the footpath.

“Oi!” Simon shouts from behind him.

Baz keeps walking, pretending as if he hasn’t heard Simon. Maybe he’s verbally accosting someone else.

“I know you can hear me, you wanker!” Simon says, a bit breathless now. He’s running. Just running in the dark towards wherever he thinks Baz is. He probably can hardly see anything through the gloom, but he’s still running. He’s the definition of a human wrecking ball.

Baz turns around to watch Simon careen towards him. He could easily evade Simon if he ran, and maybe that’s what he should do now. The wind is at his back, and so long as it stays that way he won’t catch the scent of Simon’s blood, and if Simon doesn’t catch up to him, then that doesn’t have to become a problem. But then Simon will be back tomorrow if he doesn’t let Simon catch up to him now. And does he want to go through this again tomorrow? And the day after that?

  
  


* * *

  
  


Simon practically crashes into Baz. He hadn’t expected Baz to stop, and thought instead once Baz realized Simon was running at him, might do the same. But he’d stopped and turned a bit abruptly and it was so dark, he actually does, full on, collide with Baz - who shoves him back roughly. It was strange to be able to feel him, and even briefly feel his tense form, the leather of his jacket, and then to even catch a whiff of his cologne, but not be able to make out the details of his face.

“What do you want, Snow?” Baz says, straightening his jacket. He takes two long-legged steps away from Simon as he does it.

Simon locks his shoulders, his hands fisted at his sides. “I want to know what you’re up to. It’ll be easier for us both if you just tell me now. Get it over with.”

“I’m trying to go home,” Baz snaps. “That’s it. That’s my big plot, Snow.”

He sounds annoyed, which is expected, but there’s an unusual strain to his speech, as if he’s trying very hard to hide some greater emotion that Simon can’t identify. It’s all the more difficult, because he can’t completely make out Baz’s expression, though his eyesight is starting to improve. He can see the angry tilt of his eyebrows at least and the shadowed glint of his eyes.

“You know that’s not what I mean.” Simon takes a step closer to Baz. Baz takes another step back.

“Snow, seriously, stay the fuck away from me.” He stays still this time, but Simon now can make out a tremor passing over Baz’s body, and the clenching of his hand on the strap of his messenger bag.

“Yeah, right,” Simon says, taking another step closer. He curls his lip. “You’re not even trying to pretend you’re not up to something. You’ve lost your touch, I think.”

Baz holds out a hand. They’re close enough that he can give Simon a little shove - not enough to throw Simon off-kilter, but enough that Simon gets the implicit threat of the gesture.

Simon shoves him back, harder.

“Fuck off!” Baz explodes. “I haven’t a fucking clue what you’re on about, but there’s no sinister plot afoot. I can’t imagine who you think I’d be plotting against. In case if you missed it, the Mage is dead, you —”

Simon doesn’t choose to react, or even seem to mentally process the sensation of heated rage that passes over him. One minute he’s standing half a meter away, and the next he’s in motion, throwing Baz to the pavement, who lands with a surprised grunt. He hasn’t felt this way in a while, and he has a strange out of body appreciation for the anger, leaving a clean, razed path in its wake. This he knows what to do with. He’s almost grateful to Baz.

They grapple with each other, rolling one way and then the other, neither winning or losing the scuffle. Baz keeps trying to throw Simon off, but Simon is stronger and heavier than he was as a scrappy malnourished teen, even if he’s not used to fighting like he was then, not like this. He finds, even as Baz flips him onto his back and crushes down on his pelvis with his knee, that he’s fighting a smile.

But the way Baz is pinning him down now, he has no leverage, and he’s admittedly winded. And Baz is stronger than he remembered, even as he trembles. He’s panting raggedly. The moon is at Baz’s back so even though they’re quite close now, Simon can only make out the eerie reflection of some distant streetlight in his eyes. The rest is cast in shadow.

Something very strange happens then. Baz makes a small noise, a _whimper_ and it seems as if his arms give out, and then he’s much closer. His hair tickles Simon’s cheek, and he can feel Baz’s breath against the side of his face and neck. He can smell Baz’s cologne, but he can also smell underneath it, the smell of a body spicy with sweat.

It all makes sense in one horrible moment, when he hears a sound like a small bone cracking from the vicinity of Baz’s face, his mouth, which is panting against him urgently now.

Simon struggles wildly, feeling real fear rending his anger into foamy shreds. But just when he rears back to headbutt Baz in the face (it’s how he gave Baz that crook in his nose), Baz disappears.

At least that’s what Simon thinks at first. One minute he’s there, arching over Simon, and the next he’s gone. Simon’s so confused he stays there, flat on his back for a few minutes, breathing hard.

When he sits up and looks around, he can see Baz several meters away with his back to Simon as he clutches the trunk of a tree. His head is lowered, resting against the bark.

As Simon gets to his feet, Baz turns his face, so Simon can make out his pale profile. He doesn’t speak however.

“What the hell was that?” Simon says at last, voice hoarse.

“What did it look like, Snow? Shall I draw a diagram for you?” Baz says, flatly, if also breathlessly. “Turn me into the Coven already. Honestly, at this point it’d be a relief. What are you doing?”

Simon had started to come closer to Baz, and stops on the edge of the pathway, so just a meter of space remains between them. “Nothing.” He just wanted to make sure. It was odd to see Baz like this, so shaken. In all their scraps Baz had never — he’d never been about to —

“Don’t come any closer. I can’t imagine how stupid you’d have to be to get even as close as you are now. Do you have a death wish?” Baz’s voice is tight with anger. He still won’t turn to face Simon, but he can see Baz’s hands flexing against the tree, as if its trunk were Simon’s throat maybe.

“Something’s off with you,” Simon says.

“I already told you —”

“Not that. I mean, you’ve never done that before. When we’ve fought, I mean. And you could’ve just done it. It would’ve been easy to get away with it.”

Baz flinches at that. “I don’t drink from humans.”

“What, never?” Simon huffs an incredulous laugh.

“No, never.”

“What do you drink then? Tomato juice?” He grins. He knows he shouldn’t, and maybe it’s the adrenaline of near death, but can’t help it. It’s funny.

“Don’t make a joke of this,” Baz snarls. Then he says, defeated, “I drink from animals. Obviously.”

“Right,” Simon says, putting his hands on his hips. “Well, let’s find you an animal, then.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Baz whips his head around so fast he feels something pop painfully in his neck. Rubbing the throbbing side of his neck, he says, “Absolutely not. I just need to get home and I’ll deal with it.”

“Hang on, though,” Simon says. He takes a step onto the damp grass, and because Baz is an imbecile, he’s already cornered himself against a tree. At the time, it seemed the perfect shelter, like a post to latch himself to in the storm of bloodlust that overcame him. But now Simon’s edging towards him, and he’s trapped. He can almost feel the gentle ebb of Simon’s pulse in the air, it’s so loud.

Simon stops, and takes a step back, holding his hands up in surrender. It’s still too close. “Baz, there’s something clearly wrong with you, and it seems like it could be dangerous. You’ve never done that sort of thing before.”

“I’m fine. I’ve got it under control.” Baz straightened his back, and tried to keep his face stony and very still. He has to concentrate on his breathing, and focus his attention away from Simon’s blood. It’s so close to the surface, and moving with great activity. His mouth is literally watering.

Simon glares, his eyes milky blue, and a flush on his cheeks. His righteousness, if anything, heightens the cherubic quality of Simon’s features - the dark gold of his curling hair, the constellation dust of his freckles, and his dimpled cheeks. His blush is a Renaissance painting in its own right. “You do not have it under control, mate. That’s pretty fucking clear, if you ask me.”

“Well, I’m not asking you,” Baz says, tartly. Sorry, had he been thinking Simon was a cherub? More like an evil gremlin, that rose from the depths of Hell to test Baz’s moral fiber - a test he was failing miserably.

“Maybe you should,” Simon says. “Ask me, that is.”

“Ask you what?” He’s trying to not sound as thick as he feels, but he cannot begin to fathom where Simon is going with this, and in his defense at least three quarters of his brain is preoccupied with blood and blood alone (Simon’s blood to be specific).

“Ask me — well, I don’t know. Ask me to help you.” He shrugs, as if he’d just thrown out a random example.

“Help with what?” He couldn’t decide: was he stupid, or was Simon? Simon was definitely _making_ him a little stupid, and the familiarity of that gave Baz a fortifying surge of anger. “Help me turn myself in? I think I’ll leave that to you - wouldn’t want to step on your glory.”

Simon ignores that, gesturing impatiently. “I know you don’t want to kill me. I’ve met loads of people and creatures that want to kill me, and you definitely don’t want to, and I don’t think you want to kill anyone else either. I could help. If you’ve been surviving this long without human blood, then there has to be something we can figure out.”

Baz is becoming distantly aware that if he doesn’t wrap this up in a moment, he’ll have to give in to the increasingly demanding urge to drink Simon’s blood. And in that spirit he snaps, peevishly, “Fine, yes, let’s do that.”

He’s too emotionally compromised for the beam of absolute joy Simon gives him at this. He can’t believe Simon’s nerve, to smile at him like this, as if anyone has any choice but to fall to their knees in supplication at such a beatific smile. “Really? You mean it?” As if Baz is doing him a gratuitous favor and not the other way around.

“Yes, of fucking course I mean it. I don’t know how you think you’ll be able to help, but you can start by allowing me to go home in peace. I’ve gotten a rip in my jeans, you know.” He takes a step sideways. If he goes slowly, maybe he can escape without Simon’s notice.

“Shouldn’t we exchange numbers? So we can make a plan.”

Baz rolls his eyes and sighs aggressively. But he doesn’t have much of a choice. Simon’s not letting him escape. And it’s not like he doesn’t get a little thrill at getting his hands on Simon’s mobile number. Not that he’ll ever use it, but it’s a nice fantasy. “Fine,” Baz says, and they quietly and awkwardly exchange phone numbers. Simon is grinning the whole time, and it’s anyone’s guess as to what the hell that’s about.

“All right,” Simon says, pocketing his phone. “I’ll text you, yeah?”

“Whatever,” Baz says, sidestepping Simon again. “Yes. Be my guest.”

“See you, then.”

“Yes.”

Baz takes a step away. His gums are prickling.

Simon gives a little wave, and Baz hesitantly mimics it. Then he turns around, and this time he goes running.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come say hi on tumblr @unseelieseelie :)


	3. Chapter 3

Simon shakes Penny awake as soon as he gets in the door. She’s asleep on the couch, with her head on one arm rest, while Shepard is asleep with his head on the opposite. Simon has a brief moment where he appreciates how unusual this is (they’re basically cuddling, but that’s something Simon will have to think about later, if at all) before crouching down to jostle Penny’s shoulder. She bats at him. 

“Pen,” he says. “You’ll never believe it. Penny, wake up.” 

Penny makes a whining noise and scrunches her face. She’s still wearing her glasses, though they’re resting crookedly over her nose. Simon carefully plucks them off her face, and sets them on the battered coffee table. 

That wakes her up. She sits up quickly, nearly knocking her forehead into Simon’s face in the process. “Pamela Coleman Smith, Simon!” She reels back, blushing as she glances at Shepard -then back at Simon, blushing harder. 

Shepard stretches as he wakes up, and smiles at Simon. “Man, that was the best accidental nap I’ve had in a while.” 

Simon sits back on the coffee table, but then he realizes he needs to be standing for this, and then realizes he needs to be pacing. He can feel his tail poking around the edges of his glamour, the wings shivering under their magical protection. He’ll have to change into a muscle shirt or recharge the spell if he doesn’t want his wings to burst through the back of his jacket. He quickly sheds it, so he’s just in the polo that’s part of his uniform at least. 

“Listen, okay. Listen. I — Remember I was telling you I ran into Baz, right?” 

Penny narrows her eyes. “Yes, I remember.” 

“Did you end up seeing his fangs?” Shepard asks. 

“No. Well, actually sort of.”

“Sort of?” Penny demands. 

“Just listen, okay? I wanted to see what he was up to, so — I know this is bad — but I followed him when he left work.” 

Penny sighs and closes her eyes, but gestures for him to continue. 

He finishes in a rush, having to go back and forth in time to fill in details, describing their altercation which resulted in Simon’s attempt at a kind of truce, an olive branch.   
At the end of Simon’s recap, Penny’s face is screwed up into utter bafflement, while Shepard looks absolutely thrilled. “I feel like I missed something. Baz attacked you, and you have proof that he’s a vampire, but now you want to help him?” 

Shepard nods, and touches his lips, his expression becoming thoughtful. “Yeah, I think you lost me there at little bit too actually.” 

“Someone has to help him,” Simon says. He’s pacing as he talks. He’s sweating a bit, but that’s more from excitement than exertion. “Don’t you get it? He could hurt someone if we don’t figure out what’s going on. No one else can help him probably, but we can — I mean we’ve figured out loads of stuff before. The three of us are basically professional mystery-solvers.” 

“You mean private eyes?” Penny says. 

“I was thinking Scooby Doo,” Shepard says. 

Simon points at him. “Exactly.” 

“Okay, here’s my question,” Shepard says, draping his arm along the back of the couch. “Who are we from the Scooby Gang? I feel like I’m a Velma.”

“But how are we supposed to figure out a vampire illness - or whatever's going on with Baz? We don’t know anything about vampires, and they’re sort of illegal still,” Penny says, cutting across Shepard. “So it’s technically sort of illegal to be a vampire expert.” 

“Well, we know some things about vampires,” Simon says. “We know now that vampires don’t have to drink human blood to survive.” 

“But we need someone who’s a proper expert, if you want to help Baz.”

They turn to Shepard then. 

“Well,” he says. “I’m not an expert, but I know a guy who probably is.” 

“Of course you do,” says Penny. 

* * *

The first text comes it just after four-thirty in the morning: 

_Unknown number: Are u busy after work?_

This doesn’t wake Baz up, but the next volley of notifications does it: 

_Unknown number: Or do you not work today? Guess it doesn’t matter cos I’ve got work_

_Unknown number: This is simon btw_

_Unknown number: The sooner we get this sorted the better_

It’s early enough, and Baz fell asleep late enough, that he can’t make heads or tails of the time on his phone screen, much less the meaning of this totally inane collection of texts from a stranger. His eyes keep wanting to read the time as nine-thirty in the morning, but he knows that can’t be right since it’s still dark out. 

The next puzzle is what Simon could possibly be referring to. He’d been dreaming about Simon, he thinks. At first the texts look like he’s resentfully asking him on a date, and the idea is so confusing he drops his phone back on his nightstand and goes back to sleep. Future Baz can figure that one out. 

*

When he wakes up for real at nine it takes him a while before he remembers dreaming about Simon texting him — which is just embarrassing. He’s had far more lurid dreams about Simon, to the point that he just feels sorry for himself that he’s so pathetic he had such a vivid dream about Simon texting him, and he didn’t even respond. 

While he goes about feeding Siouxie, he goes to respond to his group-chat with Dev, Niall, Keris and Trixie (currently named Gays of Watford, though that’s sure to change several times within the next day between Trixie and Niall)(Their disagreement seems to be whether “Gays” ends in an S or a Z). That’s when he sees that the text from Simon is real. As he stares at the four texts another one comes in: 

_Oi!!!!!_

Baz begins to respond several times over. Siouxie rubs against his shins and yells at him because he’s a great big stupid coward - and also probably because he’s still holding her food bowl. 

He sets down Siouxie’s bowl and then responds: 

_Baz: First of all, what are you doing texting me at 4am? What’s wrong with you? Second of all, what are you even doing sending 20 fucking texts in a row like a complete maniac? Please explain yourself._

_Simon: Great. Didn’t read all that shite. Can u meet up or what?_

_Baz: Why?_

_Simon: Shouldn’t say over text. It’s about U Know What_

Then he follows it up with an emoji of a syringe spurting with red liquid. 

_Baz: Drugs?_

Simon doesn’t respond to that for a while, which sours Baz’s embarrassingly giddy mood into a staticky haze of anxiety. He doesn’t have work or class, and it’s only his first week of class, but he should really go to the library and get started on his reading. But now he can’t stop thinking that he’s ruined something he didn’t even know he had. 

Did he really expect anything to come from his encounter with Simon the night before? Wasn’t that in itself more than he could hope for after their anti-climactic end, before either of them had even graduated? Baz had been at home in Hampshire, quietly celebrating Christmas with his family, while Simon had faced down the Humdrum and the Mage. He hadn’t even had a chance to know the last time he saw Simon that it’d be the last time he’d see him for three years. 

At least he’d gotten one feverish wank out of last night, while the memory of Simon throwing him to the ground was fresh in his mind. Or better yet, the memory of warmth that practically shimmered off of Simon as they grappled with each other. Better even than that, the smell of him - the balsam of his deodorant, then the salty tang of sweat, and all around that the fattiness of his blood. If he wanted to get anything done today, he’d have to stop there, instead of recalling what happened next as he caged Simon in with his body, torso curving down like a scythe, his open maw so very close to Simon’s neck, the frantic movement of Simon’s jugular, right there — 

He can’t even remember now what he said to Simon that set him off in the first place. He’ll have to remember it, in case he ever sees Simon again. 

*

Simon’s response comes in just when Baz has gotten himself situated in the library, notebooks, pens, highlighters, page tabs and readings arranged around him in a formidable fortress of academia. Not so formidable that he doesn’t feel a hysteria-inducing spike of relief when Simon’s text lights up his phone screen.

_Simon: Merlin’s beard, I’m at work!!! You know that’s not what I meant you twat._

_Baz: You’re the one texting me while you’re at work._

_Simon: Ya but that’s only cos u still haven’t said if you can meet up tonight!!!_

He wants to make it more difficult for Simon. It's what he would've done if they were still at Watford. It's the right thing to do, really. To put Simon off, to make Simon regret he ever suggested he'd help Baz. But he's not still at Watford, and he's not used to doing the right thing or putting Simon off or having the blaze of Simon's attention on him.

_Baz: Fine. Yes I can meet tonight._

Simon follows this with a time and address. In a few short hours he’ll see Simon again, and he’s grateful he has an abundance of school work to fill that time. He better get started - he’ll need to hunt before he sees Simon again. 

* 

Baz hesitates with his finger over the buzzer labeled with Simon’s flat number. He’s nervous. Simon lives close to his university, on a busy, if sort of run down street. The flat itself is above a shabby dry cleaners’ with an opulent pink and blue neon sign of a men’s shirt and tie filling the pavement with oddly moody lighting.   
He gives the buzzer a jab, but the button sticks and there’s no buzzing. So he texts Simon. 

A few minutes later Simon throws the door open, breathless and flushed. He’s wearing a faded grey t-shirt that properly shows off what Baz suspected and very much felt the night before. He’s filled out with muscle and good eating. His fucking arms. Aleister Crowley, his chest. Baz glowers to cover up his blatant ogling. He never looked like this at Watford, and the fact he looks like this now is quite frankly, totally egregious and uncalled for. Baz decides he’s annoyed about it. 

Simon doesn’t seem to notice Baz’s very homosexual crisis either way. He steps back, and gestures impatiently for Baz to go up the stairs behind him. Baz hesitates. He should’ve updated the groupchat to his whereabouts - as if they could stop him from doing something either completely humiliating or dangerous (what he’s doing right now, is very much both). He should’ve texted Fiona at the very least. 

Instead he shoulders past Simon, marching up creaking carpeted stairs to a narrow brown-carpeted landing. Simon comes up behind him and goes around, leading the way up another flight of creaking stairs. The top landing is inexplicably carpeted in green, leading to another brown rectangular patch right in front of the door Simon stops at. He looks over his shoulder at Baz, his expression, for just a moment oddly bashful. When he makes eye contact with Baz he scowls. He turns back around and opens the door, leaving it open behind him. 

The rabbit blood rises to the surface of his face. He can see into the warmly lit flat beyond, the hodgepodge arrangement of battered charity shop and Ikea furniture. There are posters on the walls, a blue rug, a dull red sofa. “Snow,” Baz calls. 

Simon turns, already glaring. “What are you just standing there for?” 

Baz lifts his foot, nudging the space over the threshold of the door, demonstrating its invisible barrier. He hides it well, but he’s surprised to experience an electric jolt at the contact - normally it’s painless. He raises his eyebrow at Simon’s expression of perplexed frustration. (Simon has many different frowns and scowls, all subtly different. Is it sad or impressive that Baz can still tell them apart?) 

Simon’s eyebrows shoot up. “That’s real? You seriously can’t come in?” 

“Obviously not,” Baz snaps. 

“Well, come in, I guess,” Simon says, putting his hands on his hips. He’s frowning again. This one tells Baz, “You really are a bloodsucking freak, aren’t you?” 

He follows Simon into the flat, to a kitchen. Along the way he drinks in the details, wondering what decorations or furniture belongs to Simon. It’s small, but crowded with stuff, and presumably it doesn’t all belong to Simon alone. 

He can hear voices in the kitchen, and when they enter it he sees Penelope Bunce sitting on the counter, swinging her slippered feet, and a stranger standing at the stove, someone who looks about their age. He beams at Baz and waves, as if they’re friends. He has the whitest teeth Baz has ever seen on anyone, the kind of smile you only see in clothing catalogues. Not the kind that Baz would look at, but still. 

He holds out a hand, even though they’re standing across the kitchen from each other. The stranger says in an American accent, “I’m Shepard.” 

“Right.” Baz’s gaze slides across to Penelope, who’s giving him a contemplative look, one verging on suspicious. “Bunce,” he says coolly. 

“I didn’t think you’d go for it,” she says. 

“I suppose I’m a bit curious.” 

“Would you like some tea?” the American says to Baz. He’s still smiling. Baz has never smiled like that. He imagines the American’s cheeks must be hurting. 

“Yes, thank you,” Baz says, a bit reluctantly. 

“Shepard is the one that can help us with your problem.” Baz turns quickly to face Simon, to glare at him. He’s standing closer than he thought, and he practically elbows Simon in the gut when he turns. Serves him right. 

“Is that right? And you think I’d be interested in accepting the help of a complete stranger?” 

“Shepard’s cool,” he says. “I swear. I wouldn’t have told him if he wasn’t, would I?” 

“Snow, you told practically everyone at Watford who would give you the time of day - which was everyone. I’d love to know who you wouldn’t tell.”

Simon blushes. “It’s not like that, all right? He’s a good bloke.” 

“You could spell me,” Shepard interjects. He’s still bloody smiling, the loon. “Right, P?” 

“Spell you how?” she says, now turning her skeptical gaze to Shepard. Baz relaxes. He could practically feel her stare like a physical nudge, jabbing him in the side of the face. 

“So that he knows I’m trustworthy. You could spell me so I have to tell the truth or something.” 

“Shepard, you know those spells are illegal.” 

“Yeah, but this would be consensual.” 

Penny turns away from him rolling her eyes. “Baz will just have to judge for himself whether he thinks you’re trustworthy.” 

Simon and Shepard bring over mugs of tea, a bottle of milk, and sugar. Simon pulls out the leaves of the pine kitchen table so they can all fit around it. Penny brings her desk chair out for her to sit on, since they only have three kitchen chairs, and pumps it high enough that she’s the tallest one at the table by several inches. Baz’s chair on the other hand wobbles, and he thinks this may utterly undo his sanity as well as his dignity. 

Once they’re all situated they look around at each other. 

* * *

Simon had done all he could to prepare Shepard for Baz before he arrived. “I know you’re used to dealing with uncooperative creatures and the Coven and everything, but Baz is seriously a complete dickhead.” Shepard hadn’t been worried - which was fair, considering he used to date El Chupacabra (they still text every now and then, but it sounds like things have cooled off a lot between them). 

He hasn’t seen Shepard in action, however (unless he himself counts as a magical creature. He’s got wings and a tail unlike any other human he’s seen before.)(That might explain why Shepard took a liking to him so quickly, even though he was blindingly depressed and angry when they first met.). Even though Baz’s face is set in a grim mask, everything about it angling with contempt, his eyes glinting metallic in the yellow overhead lighting, Shepard is beaming at him with absolute joy. The first thing he says, once everyone’s fixed their cup of tea, is, “You’re the first vampire I’ve ever met.” 

Baz raises an eyebrow at him, eyelids dropping a millimeter. In this lighting, the shadows under his eyes, are lilac, the veins along his eyelids are lurid purple, but his lips are oddly colorless, even for Baz. “What an honor,” Baz says dryly. 

“I mean, I have met one other vampire,” Shepard says. “But that was different. It’s a funny story how we met, actually —” 

“Shepard,” Penny says, none too gently. Both Simon and Penny had heard this story, and it wasn’t half as entertaining as it was long and circuitous. 

“I’ll cut to the chase,” Shepard says, like it was his idea, though he shoots a wink at Penny - who turns quickly back to Baz, face stoic, though blushing. 

“This guy is basically vampire royalty as far as I can tell. He’s from the states, but he’s been in town the past couple weeks. If anyone knows about vampire stuff, it’ll be him. I’ve been emailing with him all day, and he’s willing to meet with you, but you’d have to go on your own - he won’t meet with mages, and it could be complicated for me to be there.” 

Baz gives Shepard a look that managed to convey confusion as well as haughtiness. It seemed to say, “How classless of you to say something I’m baffled by.” 

Shepard glances at Simon, his smiling flagging for the first time. Penny’s stare turns a few degrees more intense, as Simon feels himself blush.

“He freelances for the Coven,” Simon says hurriedly. It’s the verbal equivalent of taking a bullet for Shepard. 

“ _What?_ ” Baz’s expression is eerily blank, almost sharper and meaner for how devoid of emotion it is. His eyebrows twitch. He stands abruptly. Him standing while they’re all sitting makes it that much more clear how out of place Baz is in their flat. He’s everything it isn’t - sleek, precise and expensive.

“Sit down. Seriously, we can trust him, Baz, he’s not going to say anything to the Coven,” Simon says, holding up his hands. 

“You’re a fucking moron,” Baz snarls. 

“Don’t call him that,” Penny says fiercely. 

“Piss off, Bunce.” He says it without looking away from Simon. He’s hardly blinking, eyes bludgeoning Simon with accusation. Simon notices a movement by Baz’s hand, and sees that he’s dropped his wand from his sleeve. 

“For what it’s worth,” Shepard says. He’s holding his hands up too. “I really disagree with the Coven’s stance on the vampire community.”

The beam of Baz’s gaze doesn’t waver. If anything, it intensifies. “This was a mistake,” he says. 

“Wait,” Simon says. He stands up too, though he’s not sure why. He could probably tackle Baz again, but it’s a different matter when they’re in his small kitchen, as opposed to a deserted park. “Just — hang on, okay? Shep really only wants to help. I mean, what’s your plan if you leave now?” 

Baz deflates marginally, and he closes his eyes, nodding to himself. When he opens them again he says only, “If I’m staying I’ll need something stronger than tea.”

Simon frowns. He wasn’t expecting that to work. 

“Here, hear,” Penny says. She hops down from her chair, and fetches a mostly full bottle of red wine and a couple glasses. 

“Really, Bunce?” Baz says, while Penny pours him a glass. His lip is curled. “A _twist-of_ f?” 

“Put a sock in it, would you, Basil?” Penny says brightly. 

Baz grumbles but takes a lengthy gulp, so that when he sets his glass down again he’s drained half of it. “Like I was saying,” Shepard says. He’s smiling again. “When you meet with this dude, Lamb, you’ll want to be careful about mentioning you’re a mage too. I don’t think it’d be dangerous, but you can never be too careful.” 

“How exactly am I meant to meet and talk to this Lamb person?” Baz throws back the rest of his wine and gestures for Penny to refill his glass. She rolls her eyes but obliges him. 

“Shepard says there are clubs for vampires. Like speakeasies,” Simon tells him. 

Simon can’t quite read the expression that Baz casts in his direction. He’s quiet after that, though, while Simon, Shepard, and Penny take turns explaining what increasingly sounds, to Simon, like a very flimsy plan. It’s not even really a plan - not when Simon remembers the intricate strategizing he, Penny, and Agatha cooked up following clues to the sixth white hare, or infiltrating a selkie clan. 

Baz keeps looking over at Simon, eyes glassy though his expression is as inscrutable as ever. He forgot how much that always bothered him while they were at Watford. He wants to grab Baz and shake him. He wants to make Baz tell him what he’s thinking. He can’t do that though. He’ll scare Baz off for good. He's already looking twitchy enough. The muscles in his neck seem to stand out, a knot of muscle bunching and smoothing in his jaw.

When Shepard is finished explaining Lamb’s credentials, his connections to the London vampire scene, and the indeed boring and convoluted story of how he met Lamb. Baz actually interrupts to ask, “Do I need to know any of this for my meeting with him?”

“Well, not technically —” 

“Great.” Baz stands up, a little unsteadily (he’s had three glasses of wine by then). He hadn’t even taken off his jacket, but he does zip it up and put his hands in his pockets. “Tell me when you find out where and when I’m meeting Lamb, Snow. Tomorrow would be ideal.” 

Simon stands up, seeing that Baz is backing out of the kitchen. “I’ll walk you out,” he says. That’s the polite thing to do, right? Or is it weird that he’s trying to be polite to Baz?

“No, I’ll see myself out.” 

“It was nice to meet you!” Shepard says, beaming at Baz. 

Baz glances at Shepard, making a face. “Thank you.” He looks back over at Simon, and gives him a nod, before he leaves. Simon watches him go from the kitchen doorway, feeling oddly dejected.  
  


* * *

The first thing Baz sees when he gets out of his afternoon lecture is Simon leaning down to drink from a drinking fountain. There’s one right outside of his lecture hall, and since he and his classmates are flooding out, he wouldn’t have noticed Simon, if not for Simon’s singularly toothsome blood-scent. He turned his head, stopping right in the stream of students, and found him right there, like he belonged there. For a moment it was possible that it wasn’t Simon, since he was hunched over, back turned, but he recognized that uniform, and he definitely recognized that head of hair. 

He would’ve turned and kept walking, but Simon stops drinking then, and turns and immediately sees Baz. 

Students flit around them, and then it’s just them in the hallway. 

“What are you doing here?” Simon says, before he gets a chance. It’s not really friendly the way he says it, but it’s not outright hostility either. 

“I have class here,” Baz says. 

“Oh.” 

“What are _you_ doing here?” 

“I work here,” Simon says. “I mean — not at the university. I’ve got a landscaping job here.” 

“Right.” 

They stand there for a very uncomfortable moment. Baz has never had an interaction with Simon that didn’t end or begin with an altercation - not until last night. His very nerve-endings are screaming at him to run away, very quickly, before Simon notices that Baz has a big, creepy crush on him and has this whole time. This is why Baz never considered being friendly to Simon before, not when the only other option was to throw himself at Simon’s feet. But he supposes now he has to at least be cordial. 

“Well, I’m getting lunch,” Baz says, stiffly. He can’t make himself smile, not even in the tight little polite way he has to at work. 

“Right, yeah, same.” Simon scrubs a hand over his hair, and then says something truly baffling: “Would you, uh, want to get lunch together? I forgot to bring mine.” 

Baz pulls his chin back. He can feel his face forming something like distaste, but he can’t make himself refuse even though a real part of him desperately wants to. _Run away run away run away damn it run away._ “All right.” 

They walk for several minutes in silence. Baz is supposed to be leading them to a cafe a few blocks away from campus, but he’s preoccupied trying to drink in Simon walking beside him using just his peripheral vision. Baz has spent some time since he last saw Simon thinking and dreaming over Simon’s chiseled hero looks, but never once did he stop and consider how Simon would change in that time. Simon was always as he’d last seen him, as golden as he was hungry. Simon now is so much better. He didn’t know that was a possibility, and it’s distressing. It’s terrible. It’s unfair. 

He’s tempted to keep walking past the cafe, to give himself more time to watch Simon obliquely. It’s the only safe way to look at him, when he’s not all the way in focus, and he can pretend as if they’re independently walking in the same direction and it’s all banal coincidence. But the silence and their even pace is also chipping away at his sanity, so even though he’s not hungry he turns into the cafe when it comes up. 

They take a table by the plate glass window, and study the menus. Baz isn’t sure what Simon’s strategy is for this lunch, but the only thing Baz is clinging to is that this is not a date. Even if it feels like a date, and from the outside it may even look like they’re on a date, or at least friends. As long as he keeps his head on, there’s no reason to panic. Or whatever mysterious, unsettling emotion is rising like bile up his throat. It tastes like bile. Maybe he’s about to be sick. 

Once they’ve placed their orders with the waitress, Simon turns to Baz, looking practically incensed. But all he says is, “I’ve been thinking a lot about tonight.” 

“That sounds like it must have taken a lot of effort,” Baz says. 

“Fuck off,” he says. Then, “I really think — I — You shouldn’t go by yourself.” 

Baz looks around the cafe. No one’s sitting near them.“Didn’t the American say no mages?” 

“His name’s Shepard,” Simon tells him, looking offended. “And _I’m_ not a mage - not anymore.” 

“Snow,” Baz says, screwing his face up. “What does that even mean?” 

“I mean, I’ve not got any magic left. I’m a Normal.” 

Baz studies Simon, looking him up and down. “I don’t think losing your magical power makes you a Normal.” 

Simon blushes, even as he glowers at Baz. “What the hell else does it make me, then? I’m not a mage, that’s the whole point.” 

Baz desperately wants to argue with Simon on this point, but Simon’s giving him that look like he’d be willing to brawl over it right in this cafe. He takes another tack. “What good would it do me to have you lurking there? It’s not as if you could defend me - if anything you’d end up someone’s meal.” He says it to scare Simon, but instead he feels a twist of dread. 

Simon on the other hand looks unfazed at the idea. “I’ll be fine. I’ve been in way more dangerous situations than this, but you probably haven’t.” 

Baz is robbed of his opportunity to respond for several minutes, when the waitress plunks their food down in front of them. Simon tucks in, oblivious to the fact that Baz is torn between throttling Simon or kissing him. Maybe both. He wants to drink his blood also, but that's a constant state of being since he was fifteen.

He leans across the table, and waits for Simon to notice him glaring - which takes a long moment, since Simon is so absorbed in devouring his massive sandwich. He looks up then, freezing. “What?” he says with a mouth full of food. 

“I probably haven’t been in dangerous situations? Do you hear yourself?” 

“If you’re talking about the Chimera, that really was your own doing,” Simon says, but only after taking another bite. 

“How do you think I became a vampire?” Baz hisses across the table. 

Simon puts down his sandwich. “Yeah, but that was different. You’re willingly walking into this.” 

“Wouldn’t that make this safer then?” 

“Not necessarily.”

“Well, forget it. I’m going by myself. I’m not going to do this and deal with you leering over my shoulder the whole time.” 

“I’m not going to be _leering_ ,” Simon grumbles. 

Baz cocks an eyebrow at Simon. “You’re not going to be there at all. I can take care of myself.” 

“Fine. But you need to text me when you’re done.” Baz has an urge to bite Simon right on his very rosy cheek for that. He won’t do it, but he wants to viscerally. 

He also is compelled to pick apart this completely baffling missive. This is the sort of thing a friend is supposed to tell you when you’re meeting someone off Tinder - not something your ex-nemesis (if ex even applies here) says to you before your covert meeting with a dark creature in order to advise you on your own evil affliction. 

Then again, are Simon and he friends now? _Is_ his meeting tonight a date? 

He has to say something, so he says, “You’re so clingy.” 

“Shut up.” Simon’s blush, somehow, intensifies. 

They’re quiet for a few minutes. Baz focuses on his sandwich, which he does not want to eat now that it’s in front of him. Not that he could really eat it here anyway, without his fangs popping. He keeps pick it up and taking things off it - slightly wilted pieces of lettuce, then all the lettuce, bits of onion. Then he realizes the whole process of undressing his sandwich is making the revulsion brewing in his stomach even worse. He finally just pushes his plate away.

Simon is just sitting there, frowning at him thoughtfully. His plate is utterly clean, without even a crumb to indicate there was a sandwich at all in the first place. “You’re not going to finish that?” 

“No, I’m not hungry.” 

Simon drags the plate towards himself, carefully reassembles one half of the sandwich and eats it. 

“Landscaping,” Baz says. 

“Huh?” 

“You said you do landscaping.” 

“Yeah. I like it. Better than I liked university at least. My boss is brilliant. She was in care like me.” 

It’s like Baz has forgotten how to have a normal conversation. Maybe he has. He rarely responds to his group chat with anything he can’t condense into a sentence fragment or emoji, and when was the last time he talked to Fiona? Or someone who wasn’t his employer or a customer? 

Simon, ever the hero, saves Baz from his desperate internal floundering. “What about you? What, um, have you been up to since Watford?” 

“Mostly university,” Baz says. Everything else is too embarrassing to mention. “I’ve just transferred out of LSE.” 

“How come?” 

“I wanted to study English literature.” He adjusts the cuff of his jumper under his jacket, just to give himself a break from the intensity of eye contact with Simon. “LSE’s better for social sciences, which is what I was studying there.” 

The waitress drops off their check, so Simon’s response is staggered. “Social science doesn’t really sound like your thing,” he says. 

“Why not?” Baz doesn’t know exactly why this rankles him, since Simon’s right. But what does Simon know, anyway? It’s not like they ever talked about these things before. 

Simon shrugs, while he unpockets a few notes and counts them out. “You just seemed more into, like, English or languages and all that. You were always reading.” 

Baz takes his time responding to this admittedly innocuous observation. They were roommates for seven and a half years, and what Simon’s described to him is just an objective fact - it hardly counts as an observation, really. Anyone with eyes could see that Baz was more inclined towards humanities, that he always had his nose in a book. But he didn’t realize Simon had noticed anything about him that wasn’t related to his vampirism or his political machinations however. His throat constricts. 

He takes out his wallet. “I’ll pay,” he says. 

Simon snatches up the check. “ _I’m_ paying, you knob. Back off.” 

“Give it here, Simon.” Baz starts to reach over the table, but Simon leans back, holding the check and his wad of notes over his head. He’s grinning. 

“You called me Simon.” 

“No, I didn’t.” 

“Yeah,” Simon says. His eyes are fucking twinkling. “You definitely did.” 

Now Baz is the one ready to wrestle Simon to the floor in the middle of a half-full cafe. Maybe not to brawl though.

He’s interrupted by the waitress collecting the check from Simon’s outstretched hand, which startles a yelp out of Simon. 

Baz laughs. 

  
  
*

“So, tonight,” Simon says as they walk back to campus. Rain is misting down, blurring the barrier between city and overcast sky. 

“What about tonight?” Baz regrets now that he didn’t wear a hood; he can feel the waves reforming themselves in his hair, frizz tickling his cheeks. Rain water is collecting in his eyelashes, blurring his view of Simon, which is unacceptable. If only he didn’t find hoodies and raincoats sartorially objectionable. 

“Shepard says to get there at midnight.”

Baz rolls his eyes. What a cliche. _This_ alone was reason enough to refrain from fraternizing with other vampires. “Fine.” 

“What’s your plan?”

Baz wipes his eyes, glancing at Simon with one eye. Simon’s got his hood pulled up, so an annoyingly cute thatch of curls sticks out over his forehead. “What do you mean? I’m going to show up, talk to Lamb, get what answers I can, and then leave. By the way, how am I supposed to recognize him? Do you know what he looks like?” 

“Nah. He’s going to wear a flower in his jacket pocket I guess. Bit weird, isn’t it?” 

“Yeah,” agrees Baz. “He knows it’s not a date, doesn’t he?” 

“That’s what I said!” 

“It is?” 

“Yeah! I mean, it’s not like we’re setting you up on a blind date. We’re basically sending you out into danger, and he wants you to recognize him by a bloody flower in his buttonhole.” He’s blushing with indignation, and even though it’s endearing, Baz wishes he wouldn’t; the humidity is turning the smell of Simon's blush into something tangible. He can practically feel it on the back of his tongue.

By this point they draw to a stop - Simon’s started to veer in one direction and Baz in the other. “My next class is this way,” Baz says, gesturing over his shoulder with his thumb. 

“Right,” Simon says, deflating a little. “I’ll text you tonight. To let you know where the club is.” 

“All right,” Baz says stiffly. “Sounds good.” 

They stand for a moment, not looking at each other. Baz isn’t sure why Simon seems reluctant to part ways, but he likes to pretend it’s for the same reason he himself is.   
“See you later then,” Baz finds himself saying. 

Simon looks up, eyes wide, cheeks pink. His lips are parted. “Right. Yeah. Later, then.” 

They turn around, walking their opposite directions through the mist. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is mainly why this story has an M rating - nothing explicit, and I'm really more doing it to be safe, but it's a bit spicy and Baz and Simon are both 20 in this. Message me if you want deets before reading! 
> 
> Also, this really could be 2 chapters, since it's practically twice as long as the others - i mainly kept it to one because i didn't want to stop and format 2 separate chapters lol.

The real question Baz just can’t settle is what he ought to wear to meet a vampire at a vampire club. Though the entire point of the exercise is to gain knowledge he seriously lacks, he doesn’t want to make a mark of himself by looking as clueless as he feels. He sits on the floor in the middle of his walk-in closet, studying the fall of fabric, the textures and colors. Siouxie keeps running in and out, with increasing agitation since he doesn’t normally sit on the floor of his closet, and on top of that, he doesn’t ever let her in there. He doesn’t particularly want her in his closet right now, but he has to focus, and no wails of feline consternation will distract him. 

But then he has to close the door behind her when she starts scratching at the garment bags, the little beast. 

He has a maroon suit with jonquil and maidenhair ferns stitched into its rich fabric, but the maroon is too close to dark heart-blood. A rookie move to be sure. On the very end of that same rack, where the colors deepen to earthy black, he has another suit, some interminable midnight hue sewn out of a lustrous velvet, gleaming blue and violet and silver even in the relative darkness of his closet. He can wear it with an emerald green silk shirt, the one that brings out the subtle green cast of his eyes, and the pink in his lips. 

He pulls the suit down from its rack, and brings it out of the closet so he can hold it under his chin in the reflection of his mirror. He could send a picture to the groupchat, to field their opinions. He wouldn’t tell them what it was for, of course. He used to do that all the time when he was dating Daniel or afterwords in the brief period of time, he went home night after night with face after face. It probably wasn’t as many as it felt like at the time, and that’s not what’s happening now anyway. 

In light of that, he skips the group chat. He hasn’t responded to them in days, and he doesn’t want this to be the reason he chimes in again. He’ll just wear the suit and have to hope for the best. 

*

The vampire club is through the door to a supply closet in an otherwise completely unremarkable off-license. Simon had texted him with directions, though now that Baz is here under the blue-white fluorescence of the shop’s lighting, he feels a bit foolish. He’s good at hiding it, however, even if in reality he’s skulking around a tiny, dingy shop, utterly out of place in his glamorous suit. But the cashier doesn’t look away from the football game on the little black and white wall-mounted telly. 

He half expects the supply closet to be just that, but as soon as he’s opened it, it’s clear he hasn’t been mislead. A rush of cool air escapes, carrying distant voices, music, clinking glasses. There’s a red carpeted staircase leading down, to a dimly lit doorway. He wants to look over his shoulder, but if he does he may simply leave. He could leave. He’d never talk to Simon or his friends again. Simon probably wouldn’t leave him alone so he’d have to quit his job and probably drop out of school. Maybe he’d join Fiona in Prague or Bucharest or Vienna - wherever the vampires are, the ones she’s killing right now. 

For a moment it’s what he wants to do more than anything. But he takes a step forward, and he closes the door behind him, so he’s alone in the murky redness of the stairway.   
A bouncer is standing just inside the doorway, a tall red haired woman in a surely priceless dress that looks like a hundred black rags sewn together. Baz is a bit covetous of it actually, but he’s never owned a dress, and anyway, he’s on the salary of a customer service worker now. 

“Password?” she says as he approaches. He can’t tell whether she’s human or vampire, and he can’t tell which one would make him more queasy right now. He can tell for certain that there are humans within the bar, even if this woman isn’t one of them. 

He’s not turning back now, though, so he tells her the password Simon relayed to him over text: “Birds of a feather.” 

She steps out of his path, and he continues on into the dimly lit bar. The bar itself curves along the far wall, gleaming off the liquid black floor. Little silver tables with pairs of architectural chairs dot the floor’s expanse. The walls on either side the ceiling slope, cave-like, into a series of alcoves, swelling with voluptuous banquettes upholstered in burgundy velvet. The lighting, the wallpaper, all of it is push, encompassing red. As he draws nearer to the bar, he tries to suss out which bar patron is human and which is vampire.

They’re all dressed in dark colors, and jewel-tones. He drank blood before this outing, but the scent of blood hangs in the air like a cloud of smoke. He can almost see it’s red shape hovering in the air, over his field of vision. 

But then he gets to the bar and he orders a vodka soda. When he turns his head, to get a look around the club, since it’s nearly midnight now, there’s a man standing at his elbow.   
The man smiles. “Nice suit,” he says in a pleasant transatlantic accent. 

“Thank you.” Baz looks down to see a dark red, dark center poppy tucked in his buttonhole. His own suit is beautiful. It’s light-colored (maybe blue or green, it’s hard to tell in the club’s warm lighting) with a satiny finish. He meets the other man’s gaze.“Lamb.” 

“You must be Baz.” 

Baz takes a bracing gulp of his drink before answering. “How did you know?” 

“Shall we find somewhere more comfortable to sit?” Lamb says as the bartender slides over a tumbler with a couple fingers of whisky. It has a piece of ice shaped like a globe floating heavily in it. He’d expected something a little more…sanguine. 

Baz gestures for Lamb to lead the way. He takes them to one of the banquettes. 

Lamb waits for them both to get comfortable and situated before he speaks again. “I knew it was you because the vampire community is small around here. I know all the vampires here, even if it’s just by sight alone. You, I’ve never seen before.” 

Baz frowns at that. “But you’re from America, aren’t you?” 

“Actually,” says Lamb, “I’m originally from England. I haven’t been back in decades, but it’s not at all common anymore that new vampires crop up anymore, not for the last hundred years or so. Most people wouldn’t raise a new vampire in this environment. Things have gotten so very ugly here.”

Baz covers his reeling by taking a long sip of his drink. Even then, it takes him a few long moments more of parsing out what part he needs to address first. 

“When you say raising a vampire, you mean…” he says. 

Lamb laughs at the question, and sort of frowns and smirks at the same time. “I mean mentoring a vampire you’ve turned. It’s how things are done - you don’t turn someone and then release them on the world. You seem a bit out of touch with the vampire community out here - if you don’t mind my saying.” Lamb drapes an arm over the back of his seat, smiling a little. 

“I never knew the vampire that turned me, if that’s what you mean.” Baz tries to lean back too, and keep his shoulders against the cushion. He’s trying to keep himself from downing his entire drink in one go, especially since he forgot to eat a proper dinner before he left, and the alcohol is already hitting his bloodstream in a way that isn’t too pleasant at the moment. 

“How have you managed this long without?” Lamb’s little secretive smile has faded, and he looks concerned. Maybe it’s just the way he looks, but to Baz, there’s something subtly mocking in his gaze even still. His eyes are so light, silver blue and depthless. Maybe that’s why - just their intangible color. 

“I’ve been perfectly fine.” Baz’s tone is a little sharper than he intended, but he tries not to show it. 

Lamb holds up his hands. “Well, that’s not true, is it, Baz?”

“I’ve been fine up until quite recently.” 

Lamb ducks his head as he leans forward, nothing mocking about his expression now. “You’ve not been drinking human blood, have you?” 

“I’m not a murderer,” Baz says. There’s nothing he can do about his tone at this point. 

Lamb laughs outright at that. 

Baz polishes off the rest of his drink. 

“You’re serious. You really think that, don’t you?” Lamb says, resting his chin on his laced fingers. 

Baz scoffs. “What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“It means, that you should know most of us aren’t murderers - not if you’re doing it right. There are sickos everywhere, but being a vampire doesn’t mean you’re a murderer. In fact, drinking blood can be quite pleasurable for humans - if you do it right. You really shouldn’t believe what you see in the movies, if that’s where you’ve been getting all this.”   
Baz narrows his eyes. “You’re taking the piss.” 

Lamb laughs at that, leaning back again. “I promise you, I’m telling the truth. In fact, I can tell you that’s what’s causing your illness.” 

“Illness?” Baz says, hand clenching on his glass. 

“Yes. I could tell as soon as I laid eyes on you. You look peaky. You’re obviously not drinking human blood, and it’s leaving you malnourished. Always thirsty. Am I right?” 

“Can I die from it?” He pushes his glass away so it won’t shatter in his grip. Or throw it at the wall. Or at Lamb. 

“Eventually it would leave you in a sort of death. You’d become paralyzed and then comatose, and it’s not easy for a vampire to be woken from that state.” Lamb looks like he’s discussing the weather or the stock exchange 

“I see,” Baz says. His voice is level, but that’s just good breeding. The backs of his eyes and throat feel molten. He fists his hand in his lap so Lamb doesn’t see it shaking.   
Lamb takes a slow sip of his drink, watching Baz over the rim. He sets the glass down, and dips a hand inside his blazer. He draws out a little red and black rectangle. He holds it out to Baz, who takes it mechanically. 

On one side it says his name, “Aldous Lamb” with a phone number and email address. On the other side is a swirling logo: The Katherine.   
He looks up at Lamb. 

“That’s for you to use at your discretion, Baz. I don’t know how much help I’ll be, since I’m based out of the states, but it’s better than nothing. You shouldn’t cut yourself off they way you have been.”

Baz looks down at the card. “Thank you, I think.” 

“You’re welcome. I’m off for a refill, would you like another?” 

“Sure,” Baz says, still looking at the business card. He tucks it inside his jacket pocket, and smiles a little bit, a sliver of a smile, at Lamb. “Thanks.” 

Lamb smiles back and heads for the bar. 

* * *

Simon gets Baz’s call as he’s cleaning his room. He saves it for when he’s feeling particularly agitated, and if Penny and/or Shepard are out or asleep (which they both are now - on the couch again) (Simon will have to address whatever’s going on there at some point). He’d been ready to fall asleep himself when he’d been watching TV with Penny and Shepard earlier. 

But as the time approached midnight, his body twitched awake. He started by first checking his mobile to see Baz hadn’t texted him. That was fine. It wasn’t yet eleven at that point. He left his phone charging on his nightstand, so he wouldn’t check it, and went to do the dishes. Then he wiped down the counters and kitchen table. Then he swept. By then it was a quarter past midnight. He didn’t expect Baz would have texted him at that point, but he still checked anyway. 

He makes his bed and picks dirty clothes off his floor. Then when he’s bending over he notices all the stuff he’s kicked under his bed and starts sorting that out. It’s all crap, nothing worth keeping. Mainly old clothes that don’t fit anymore since he gained weight via depression, the consistent presence of foot, and physical labor. Lots of jumpers and shirts he nicked from lost and found bins at care facilities over summer months. All stuff he doesn’t want to keep. His duffle coat from Watford (doesn’t fit him, but he can’t bring himself to throw it away either). A single mitten and a pair of trainers he thought he’d lost and already replaced and wore out and then decided he didn’t really like anyway. His text books from his stint at uni. 

While he’s contemplating the text books, his phone rings.He scrambles over his bed to grab his phone with such vigor he sends his flimsy nightstand rocking, and nearly topples onto the floor. “Baz?” he says a bit breathlessly. He flops onto his back, and then immediately realizes he needs to be pacing so he does that instead. 

“I’ve survived my rendezvous.” There’s a tinny radio noise in the background, the rustling of wind. Baz’s voice sounds sort of loose - not like he’s slurring, but the edges have been softened. 

“Where are you?” 

“I’m in an Uber.”

“Oh.” Simon is practically bursting with questions, but every one is jamming its way up his throat so he can’t fit through even one. He takes a deep breath - that’s what his therapist tells him to do when his words get jammed up. Normally one thing will surface once he’s done that, but right now it’s not working for him. He just feels deflated once he’s done breathing. 

“Anyway, I’m alive. You can go back to sleep or whatever it was you were doing.” 

“I wasn’t sleeping,” Simon tells him. Then, “Wait, you have to tell me what happened. What did he tell you? What was he like?” Suddenly he’s holding back the questions with great effort. 

Baz sighs. “Ugh, I’m not going over this on the phone.”

“Come on, tell me something.” 

Baz is quiet for a long moment. Simon can almost make out the song on the radio. _Is that Hot Line Bling?_ “If you really want to know, come over.” 

Simon stops in his tracks. “What, right _now_?” 

“You said you weren’t sleeping.” 

“I wasn’t. I’m not. I mean, if you’re sure,” Simon says. He feels all flustered all of a sudden. He’s never really gone over to someone’s house this late. It’s just Baz, but still. Bit weird. 

“Why not?” Simon can practically picture the lazy rotation of Baz’s hand, to underline the melodrama of his apathy. “I’ll text you the address.” He rings off without saying good bye. 

*

Baz answers the door wearing a dark suit made out of velvet, with a green silk shirt unbuttoned half way down his chest. Which is weird, because he can see black chest hair and he’s never noticed Baz’s chest hair before. It bothers Simon, and it bothers him that it bothers him. It’s a nice suit. He looks like a proper vampire in it, all luxurious and leonine. Baz also has soot or something, makeup smudged on one side of his face, though on the other side it’s mostly intact. Two darts of black that elongate his eyes, into lurid proportion, like a character out of a manga or a screen siren. 

Baz waves Simon into his flat with the hand not holding the door open. He’s holding an unopened wine bottle in that hand. “Come in already, it’s cold out.” 

Simon hustles past Baz into the flat. It’s everything his apartment isn’t. It’s spotlessly clean, and sort of drafty in the sheer amount of space visible. He can see down the long, shadowed gullet of the flat, and it goes on quite far. It’s probably three times the size of the flat he shares with Penny and Shepard. It’s what he would’ve pictured for Baz, but even so, it’s seems so adult. The furniture is all dark and richly upholstered or glossed with a distinctive patina of age. Framed band posters and art prints are mounted on the walls. It smells of cigarette smoke a bit - not fresh, but definitely as if someone habitually smokes in here. 

He startles when a little shape darts at him, and barely stifles a shriek of surprise. As it draws near, he can see it’s a little black cat with a white spot on its chin. 

“That’s Siouxie,” says Baz from right behind him. 

Simon startles a bit at that too. “Fuck’s sake,” he mutters, putting a hand on his chest. 

Baz smirks at him. 

When he looks down. She’s standing against his shins, sniffing his shoes, tail quivering and arched into a question mark. He bends down to pet her head, but as his fingers make contact she chirps at him inquisitively. She tilts her head back to sniff his hand. 

“She’s cute,” he says. 

“Yeah,” says Baz. “She is. I found her in an alleyway when I was looking for rats to drink. I was going to drink her actually, but I couldn’t. Now I can’t drink stray cats at all.”   
Simon looks up at Baz, his hand stilling on the cat. 

Baz is smiling a little still, but his eyes look serious. He’s not looking at Simon, he’s looking at Siouxie. He crouches down, and she goes to him. He stands up, cradling her in his arms. Simon’s never seen someone hold a cat like that before, but he’s holding her like a baby, with her paws curled close to her body. He gazes down at her smiling, and she touches his chin with a paw. 

Simon feels… something. Seeing Baz like this, tenderly holding this little animal to his chest, and gently smiling at her. It’s weird that this is the same person that’s tried to kill him

several times, and the same person still that he had lunch with earlier today. 

Baz walks on into the flat, holding the cat like that. “Come on, Snow, let’s catch you up.” 

Simon jogs a little to catch up. Baz stops to turn on lights along the way, and has to put down Siouxie when she starts squirming and complaining. 

When they get to the kitchen at the back of the flat, Baz takes down a pair of wine glasses.

“Actually, I’d rather not drink,” Simon tells him. 

Baz gives him a sour look, all the more surly for his smeared eyeliner. “But you have to catch up to me.” 

Simon shrugs. 

Baz holds his gaze for a tense moment, with growing ferocity, and then groans. “Fine, I’ll just have tea and sober up, _I suppose_.” 

“Ooh, I’ll have some too, thanks.” 

Baz fills the kettle then turns it on, grumbling the entire time. 

“You still haven’t told me how it was,” Simon says once Baz stops faffing about with the kettle and stands against the opposite marble-topped counter. 

Baz crosses his legs and then his arms. He tilts his head back to look at Simon through slitted grey eyes. “It was… informative.” 

“Yeah? So he wasn’t full of shit?” It’s what he’d been most worried about - Baz finding the exercise a waste of time. 

“I don’t think so, no.” The kettle goes off, and he pours them each a cup. He takes out the milk holding it up in question. 

Simon takes it from him and pours his own milk while Baz stirs an ungodly amount of sugar into his own cup. This close Simon can smell the hint of the night on Baz - a bite of alcohol, and a trace of his verdant cologne. 

He doesn’t continue until he leads them back into the living room, and they’re seated on either end of a black leather couch. It’s weird, Simon and Baz have probably never sat on a couch together before, and the striking familiarity of it gives Simon the urge to sit instead on the cushy looking arm chair beside the couch instead. But he already sat here and he doesn’t want to draw attention to how weird he suddenly feels. He focuses on blowing the steam off his tea, until Baz speaks. 

“He told me that when vampires drink from humans they rarely kill them,” he says at last. He sounds completely sober now. He looks down into his mug. 

“He did?”

“He said that’s why I’ve been having this issue - because I don’t drink human blood.” 

“Huh.” 

Simon takes a lengthy sip of tea to give himself some time, while Baz shoots him a look. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Baz demands as soon as Simon sets his mug down on the coffee table. 

“Just… I don’t know.” Simon shrugs. He turns his body, resting his bent knee on the couch cushion between them. “What are you going to do? Just find some random human to try it with?” 

“What else am I supposed to do?” Baz says. His voice is even, and maybe someone else would think he sounds calm and neutral, but Simon knows him better. He’s surprised to find that he knows him so well, but it’s like there are little needle points under the velvet of Baz’s voice - he can just tell. “He says I could fall under a coma if I don’t. Maybe that’s what you want.”

“No!” He says it more forcefully than he intended, but he did not go through all this effort to help Baz only to have him get some dodgy vampire coma. “I mean — no, that’s not what I want, all right? That’s not what I meant.” 

He scoots a little closer, because now it seems weirder to him they’re sitting so far apart. 

“What are you doing?” Baz’s eyes are flinty, twitching back and forth like Simon’s trying to corner him. 

Maybe he is. 

“Baz,” he says. “I think you should bite me. At least for your first human.” 

* * *

Baz is physically incapable of responding for several moments. He blinks as if Simon’s just kicked dirt in his eyes, and not offered him something he’s wanted ever since his bloodlust first emerged. He keeps his eyes down, into his empty tea cup when he responds. Simon’s looking at him so earnestly it hurts. He says, “Why? You think I won’t be able to stop and I’d kill a Normal?”

Simon adjusts, scooting a little closer again. He props one arm on the back of the couch. For a wild instant he has a terrible suspicion that Simon knows all about his feelings for him, that he’s trying to embarrass Baz, and expose him for the lech that he is. But how could Simon know? No one knows about that. 

“No — I mean, I don’t think you’d really be considering it if that was the case.”

“Why do you think that?”

"You don’t seem like that sort of person."

“I don’t?” Baz says faintly. He can almost sense the aborted surge of blood to his face. It’s such a stupid thing to feel flattered about. _Good job being even more pathetic than previously thought possible._

“No,” Simon says. “You don’t.” He says it so simply, as if he hadn’t spent their childhood on a mission to prove that Baz was a vampire and expose him. 

“So why would I drink your blood?” Baz says, and wishes he hadn’t. Saying it out loud is so lewd. Lewd enough it sends a thrill down his spine. 

Simon blushes. “It’s just. You have to be careful. It’s still dangerous to be a vampire here, and if it was someone you didn’t know — you could get turned in to the Coven! Or what if they caught you?” 

Baz narrows his eyes at Simon. “What is going on? Why are you concerned about my well being?”

“I’m not,” Simon says hotly. Then he shakes his head. “What I mean is, I — I am, I guess. But there’s nothing weird about that.” He juts his chin out. He has a wild look in his eyes. They’re gleaming with ferocity, with righteous purpose. Simon really is like an angel in the Biblical sense - he’s a beam of blinding purity and celestial intent personified. Why isn’t Baz shriveling up into a burnt husk under Simon’s heavenly regard? 

“It is a bit weird, considering how much effort you’ve put into proving my vampirism - and very publicly at that,” Baz says wryly. Which is a feat, that he manages to sound wry at all.   
“Yeah, but not recently,” Simon says. “And you haven’t answered me - whether you’ll do it.”

Baz leans back against the arm rest. He looks first into Simon’s right eye, and then his left, looking for something - a grain of doubt or trepidation. He sees his pupils flex. The dark blue and light blue striations of his eyes contract subtly. 

“I’ll do it,” he says, because he doesn’t have the strength to refuse. 

“Should we just do it here then? On the sofa?” Simon looks around, as if Baz would have a more suitable place for Baz to drink his blood. 

“What, you want to do it now?” This was moving too quickly. He’d been tipsy barely an hour ago. Yes, he was sober now (shockingly so), but it was three in the morning, and shouldn’t he be getting to bed? And did he really want to do this? If he did it, he can’t go back, he’ll know the taste of human blood. Simon’s blood. But then, when he thinks about it he doesn’t want to drink a random stranger’s blood. He wants to drink Simon’s. 

“Why not?” Simon says, unzipping his hoodie and taking it off. The heat and scent of blood wafts into the air. Now the scent of blood isn’t simply distracting - it’s a physical presence between them. His gums are aching with the effort it’s taking to keep his fangs from dropping. “I’m here now, and you’re probably thirsty.”

Baz releases a shaky breath. His thoughts are all snarled into a briar, with Simon and his blood scent coating every thorn. He opens his eyes. “You have to be sure.”

“I am.” 

“It’ll probably hurt.”

Simon smirks. “Now look who’s being weirdly concerned.” 

“Don’t be an imbecile,” Baz says He sneers, just to inject some normalcy into this conversation. He stands up. “We’re not doing this here.”

Simon gets up, and he can hear his footsteps behind him as he leads Simon to his bedroom. “How come?” he says. 

“I share the apartment with my aunt. It’s better if we don’t use a common area.” 

“Wait - what? Your aunt is here? Has she been here the whole time?” He can hear Simon’s stopped walking so he turns to face him in the flat’s semi-darkness. 

“No, she’s in Budapest until the end of the month.”

“Oh, okay.” Simon visibly relaxes. He’d forgotten that Fiona may have tormented Simon a handful of times. 

He’s almost too preoccupied with the idea that soon he’ll be drinking Simon’s blood to think about Simon seeing his bedroom. When he opens the door he’s reminded of the shocking fact that Simon is already in his personal space, and now he’s taking Simon into the heart of it. Outside of Baz and Fiona (and Siouxie if she counts) only Daniel has seen his bedroom. He wishes he had a minute to make it presentable, but he’s already led Simon here. 

So he stands back, and lets Simon enter. 

* * *

When Baz turns on his desk lamp he’s surprised to see his room doesn’t quite match the cool sterility of the flat beyond. The furniture is nice, but it’s sort of an odd mix - the desk and desk chair are new and sleek (Baz shifts a pile of clothes off the chair and the desk has at least four different mugs scattered overtop, and is littered with books and pens), but an ornate red and gold wing chair sits in the corner, and the nightstand next to the bed is richly carved mahogany. There’s a porcelain and gold statue of a swan on top of it, that Simon realizes is actually a lamp when Baz turns this on as well. The bed is in yet another style, maybe matching the desk more - with a low wooden frame, while the bedding looks to be done up in dove grey silk. It smells a little stale, as if the window hasn’t been opened in a while - the plum-colored black out curtains look forbidding enough. He probably hasn’t opened it in a while, from what Simon remembers of their spats at Watford. 

“You can sit here,” Baz says gesturing to the desk chair while he disappears into his closet with the armful of clothing that once occupied the chair. 

Simon sits. It’s a little higher than is comfortable to him so he adjusts it with the lever underneath the seat. “You want me to sit here while you do it?” 

“No,” he says, coming back out of the closet. “But I need to get some towels to put on the bed.”

“Right.” 

Baz leaves and then Simon’s alone in Baz’s bedroom - which is somehow significant in some indefinable way, even though they shared a room for years. This is Baz’s room without Simon in it, and even though he’d never thought about it before now, he would’ve thought Baz’s room would be stylish and spotlessly clean. The furniture and decorations are all probably priceless antiques, and what isn’t is definitely a cut above flat-pack Ikea furniture, but the awkward mixture of everything, the messiness, it’s oddly… endearing? Is that the right word? “Oddly” is definitely the right word. 

He’s trying to not think about it. 

He’s also trying not to think about whatever’s about to happen. His hands feel clammy and he keeps having to wipe them down his jeans. His armpits feel damp. There’s nothing to think about anyway. This is the right thing to do, he has no doubts about it even if less than an hour ago he hadn’t the faintest idea this is something he’d be submitting himself to. Really, it’s sort of exciting - life has been so much about forming and maintaining a routine, a system of healthy coping mechanisms, therapy, so much therapy, that there’s been so little room for magic or even something exciting to happen. 

He side-steps thinking about how he’ll describe tonight to his therapist later this week. 

* * *

On the way to the linen closet Baz finds Siouxie where he knows she’ll be — curled up on Fiona’s pillow. When he finds her there, she’s already awake, as if she knew he’d come looking for her. She probably just heard him in the hall. He kneels down next to the bed to look into the shimmering reflective green of her pupils. He strokes the silky soft top of her head with one finger, like she’s a hamster and not like she’d gladly eat one. She purrs. It’s the only way he knows to keep himself from thinking too much about what he’s about to do. 

“If I didn’t kill you, I’m not going to kill Simon,” he whispers to her. 

He nods to himself, to Siouxie. He goes and gets the towels. 

When he gets back to his room, Simon stands up looking comically startled. He tries to repress a smile at the sight, and turns his back on Simon while he goes about stripping back his comforter and covering the pillows with two layers of towels. He can feel Simon staring at him. 

He ought to open a window. He would if it wasn’t freezing cold outside. He can feel Simon looking at him, his eyes are zapping the base of his skull. 

“You can sit there, against the pillows,” Baz tells him. His voice sounds choked and raspy and he clears his throat, though it feels bone dry. 

The air stirs around him, heat lapping against his neck. Simon’s pulse is quick. He can feel it on his tongue already. He has to repress a shudder at that. 

Simon comes over to the bed, and sits on the edge. 

Even though he knows it’s stupid, he sits in the desk chair Simon had just vacated. He crosses his arms, and then his legs. He knows he’s clenching his jaw, but he can’t stop. 

“Where do you want to do the bite?” Simon asks. 

Baz’s gaze drops involuntarily to Simon’s throat. When he looks back up at Simon, he’s sort of smirking. Damn it. “Wherever would be most comfortable for you.” 

“It doesn’t really make a difference to me where you do it. You must have some kind of preference though, yeah?” 

“Must I?” Baz tries to drawl it, but his voice sounds so wretched there’s no mistaking his desperation. He’s imploring Simon. Must I? 

Simon wipes his palms on his jeans. “Well, yeah. I mean, I figure the neck is traditional, but I really don’t know anything about vampires.”

Baz lets himself take a moment to look at Simon. His neck would be ideal. It’s where he’s always imagined doing it, and his neck is so… objectifiable. If he knew anything about being a vampire, he knew at least that much. His eyes travel lower. He could bite over Simon’s heart. He doesn’t let himself look any lower. 

“Your neck should be fine,” he hears himself tell Simon. 

“Brilliant,” Simon says, for some reason. He nods to himself, and then starts taking off his shoes. And then he starts taking off his shirt, pulling it up and over by the back of his collar.

“What are you _doing_?” Baz stands up, as if to stop him. 

Simon stops, and blushes as he pulls it over his hair. “I don’t want to get blood on it. This is Shepard’s shirt and I didn’t ask if I could borrow it.” 

  
It’s not even a nice shirt - it’s a grotty, faded red t-shirt with a logo for a barbecue restaurant somewhere called Twenty-Nine Palms. Baz tries not to look down past Simon’s freckled shoulders. He won’t. Although it feels awfully unfair to have to restrain himself from looking when he also has to restrain himself from sucking Simon dry. (Lamb had told him that doesn’t happen, but this is a lifetime of thirst Baz is catching up with.) 

Simon, balls up his shirt and sets it on the bed behind him, then scoots back so he’s sitting against the pillows at the head of the bed. Baz is still trying very hard not to look, but he can tell Simon’s blush is intense enough that his neck and chest are as pink as his face. 

“Is this good?” Simon asks him, reclining half-way onto his elbows. 

“Yes, that’s fine.” He gets up, and sits on the bed next to Simon. He’s watching himself watch Simon watch himself. Somehow this is really happening. He’s sitting next to a shirtless Simon Snow on his bed, and he’s about to drink his blood. 

He realizes he’s been staring fixedly at Simon’s neck, at a mole there. The muscles under it ripple as Simon swallows. He meets Simon’s gaze, and Simon smiles at him a little.

“Should we, uh, get on with it, then?” Simon says. 

Baz nods. He swallows. He shifts closer to Simon, so that he’s laying next to Simon on the bed, hardly a foot apart from him. Now that he’s close, now that he’s about to bite Simon, he does look down at him, his wide chest, which looks both firm with muscle and soft from eating well. He’s soft through his midsection. Sparse gold hair dots his chest and forms a line down his belly. It’s lighter than the hair in his armpits, but it matches the hair on his forearms. He wants to lick and bite and eat Simon, and not even as a vampire (but definitely also as a vampire). He wants to hump Simon’s leg like a dog and howl at the moon. He breathes in Simon’s smell, the redness in him turning quickly, beating against his senses like a whip. He smells like only good things, savory-sweet, delicious things. 

His fangs descend, as his eyes find the mole on his neck. An artery behind it flutters blue-green right there. 

Simon’s saying something. He’s saying his name. 

* * *

He couldn’t tell how or if Baz was much affected by this whole thing ever since he came back to his bedroom with the towels. The slightest hint of nerves, but he mostly seemed almost listless. Not for the first time, and probably not for the last, he wanted to know what Baz must be thinking. He’d expected to have to bully Baz into sucking his blood.   
The first real sign of life Baz gave was when he took his shirt off. That seemed to set him off, like now that Simon had taken this next step towards the blood drinking itself, it was that much more real. 

And now Baz is next to him, staring at his neck, and he watched as Baz’s fangs dropped, sliding against the inside of his mouth, to form two bulges on either side of his lips. He’d seen the outline before, but he’d never watched it happen. Baz’s eyelids are half closed, and his breathing comes fast and shallow. He takes quick little breaths, like he’s scenting the air, like an animal. Except Baz isn’t an animal, he’s a person. 

“Baz,” he says. 

Baz doesn’t look up, so Simon has to say his name again. When Baz drags his gaze up to meet Simon’s, his pupils are huge and glossy, and his irises are only a hazy rim. “What?” he says, slurring around the fangs. Then his stare turns wide, and alarmed. He covers his mouth with his hand. “Fuck.” 

“Let me see,” Simon says. 

“I don’t think so,” Baz says from behind his hand. 

“Oh, go on. Let me see them. You’re about to bite me anyway.” 

Baz looks tense and annoyed. He gives Simon a searching stare - first one eye, then the other, and back again. He lets his hand fall to his lap. The fangs are big, big enough that the points dig into his lower lip. His mouth is so pink and soft looking, framing his white teeth - which are anything but. “Wicked,” Simon breathes, without thinking. He can feel his face get hot. 

Baz scoffs. “There’s something wrong with you.” But he moves closer to Simon then, and gestures with his chin at him. “Lay down all the way. Your arms might buckle.”   
Simon shifts down the bed, and settles his head against the towel-covered pillows. They smell a bit like Baz, like his detergent. But then, maybe that’s just Baz himself, since he’s right there, definitely within smelling-distance. 

It’s getting harder to stop himself from thinking about it. About how odd this is. If this was happening while they were at Watford, he’d probably be a lot better about not thinking about it, and just letting it happen. That was practically his job back then - to do, not think. Baz is laying on his side now, close enough that Simon’s arm is practically touching Baz. He wishes Baz would just get it over with, but he’s too nervous to cajole him into it. 

“I’ll have to lean over you a bit to do this,” Baz says. 

Simon looks over at Baz and nods. 

Baz sits up half way then, on one elbow. He reaches across Simon with his other arm, hand braced on the pillow next to Simon’s face. Eye contact feels too intense, but Simon doesn’t want it to be obvious he’s avoiding it, so he tries to look at Baz’s nose - but he ends up just staring fixedly at Baz’s mouth, his parted lips, the knife blades of his teeth. 

“Is this okay?” Baz asks softly. 

Simon swallows and nods quickly. It’s like the other night, when he’d fought with Baz in the park, with Baz leaning into his space - except it’s also completely different. Like then, he senses the contained power in Baz’s lean body, the liveliness and tension even in his stillness and control. He doesn’t feel afraid now, even if he’s nervous. 

Baz dips his head slowly. His hair falls forward, tickling Simon’s collarbone. He can feel Baz’s breath on his neck. It’s cool and even and Simon can feel his hairs standing on end all over his body. “I’m going to do it now,” Baz murmurs from under Simon’s chin. “All right?” 

“Yeah,” Simon breathes. “Do it.” 

* * *

As soon as he lays down next to Simon he knows. He’s not going to kill Simon. He can’t kill Simon, because it would be just as good as killing himself. More than that, he can’t kill Simon, because Simon’s put himself in Baz’s trust. He could prove to Simon and to himself that he’s nothing more than a parasite and lay waste to the most powerful mage who ever walked this earth. It would be easy to do. But he doesn’t want to do that. 

He breathes in Simon, and he breathes out all the darkness. He feels his own breath tickle his chin, his face is so close to Simon’s neck. He opens his mouth and bites down.   
It feels like the first time he’s ever bitten into a living thing. His flesh parts easily under his fangs, and warm, salty, rich blood fills his mouth. He feels Simon tense under him, and distantly a part of him registers Simon make a noise of surprise or pain. But Simon grips his biceps, holding Baz in place, like he thinks Baz would break away. 

Each pulse is another cup pressing to Baz’s lips, pouring hot, tender mouthfuls of something deeper and realer than life. This is nothing like drinking from deer, or rodents, or cats. Each pulse of blood on his tongue sends a wave of red through him, a hypnotic spiral made only of color, of cherry, crimson, poppy, and ruby. He can taste Simon in it — Simon holding him. Not as he’s physically holding Baz, but psychically. He can taste Simon’s desire, his yearning. He can taste Simon taking care of him, even as he submits himself to Baz’s monstrous, unending want. 

But that’s not right, is it? He can feel the shape of his own desire now, where he’d always known it as a ceaseless plague of locusts. It has a distinct shape, and it has boundaries, he realizes now. He’s never tasted anything so rich, so good, and before long he’ll be completely sated - faster than his human appetite would be.

* * *

It’s not at all like Simon expected it to be - though he didn’t really have expectations to begin with. He did expect it to hurt, which it did at first. He’s sustained worse injuries than this bite though. 

But then the pain turned from sharp and exacting to a deep throb, and that throb carried with it something else entirely. The bed under him started to undulate, frothing and foaming. He was vaguely aware he might be making some kind of noise. He hoped he wasn’t moaning, but even that thought seemed to drift through and then out of him, into the foam churning under him. Or maybe it went where everything else went: into Baz’s mouth. 

Baz is so powerful, so much more powerful than he ever let on. Just as he drinks in Simon, Simon can feel Baz reaching into him, caressing him from the inside. He’s holding Simon up, that must be why Simon feels so weightless. He holds onto Baz so he won’t float away - and even still, he knows he doesn’t have to. Baz won’t let him. 

* * *

And just like that, he was getting full. _Full_. Other senses came back to him slowly as the thirst abated - his sense of hearing, his sense of touch. Simon was breathing raggedly, moaning a bit actually. He was sort of rocking his hips arrhythmically against Baz’s hip and his arms were warm and heavy around Baz’s shoulders. He’d tangled his fingers in Baz’s hair. 

He licked over the punctures in Simon’s neck, sealing it over with a coat of sticky venom to stop the bleeding. He raises his head slowly. He feels like he’s swimming a little, everything in slow motion. Like waking up from a dream. Simon falls still as Baz repositions - thankfully. Baz doesn’t know what to do with the visual of Simon writhing under him. He’ll have to think about it later when he’s alone. 

Simon’s eyes are closed, but he’s breathing and he’s smiling a little. His arms are still draped over Baz, but he doesn’t seem to be aware. His lips look a little pale though.   
Baz touches Simon’s forearm behind his head, lifting it a little. “Let me get you some water.” 

“Mm-hm,” Simon hums around an exhale out his nose. He doesn’t move though, so Baz gingerly lifts Simon’s arms over his head so he can get up. 

The flat feels almost unbearably cold and silent outside of Baz’s bedroom. It’s also strangely bright, in comparison. He forgot he’d left all the lights on, and he turns off some of them as he makes his way to the kitchen. Even though the flat is cold, bright, and empty, he feels tethered and warm. He can somehow feel Simon resting in his bed even as he walks away. He feels blood in his face, in his chest. It’s not the heady weirdness he felt in the midst of drinking. Instead he feels awake, fresh, and dewy. He feels strangely very alive.   
He gets down a tall glass from the cabinet and fills it with water. He needs something sweet to give to Simon — isn’t that what they do when people donate blood? Luckily, he has a sweet tooth, so even if he’s mostly out of all other foods, he has two packages of biscuits. Just to be safe, he also puts an Aero bar he’d been saving on top. He carries his tower of sweets balanced on one hand and holds the glass of water in the other - but then he has to shuffle everything to one arm so he can open his door. 

Simon’s still laying in his bed, but his eyes open this time. He sits up on his elbows as he accepts the glass of water from Baz. “Thanks,” he says. He sounds a little hoarse.   
He drinks deeply, and Baz looks away so he’s not staring at Simon’s throat more than he already has. He sits on the edge of the bed, angled so he’s facing the foot of the bed like Simon, with one foot on the ground and his knee bent on the mattress. “I also brought you some biscuits,” Baz says. He hands over the packages, including the Aero bar.   
Simon blushes a little at this for some reason. It takes him a moment, before he reverently accepts the biscuits. He looks strangely serious, as Baz takes the empty glass from Simon and sets it on the nightstand. When he turns back to Simon, he’s staring at Baz. The blue of Simon’s gaze is pinning him in place. He thinks Simon’s maybe about to do something. Headbutt him maybe. He imagines leaning down and kissing Simon, the serious set of his mouth. 

Instead he plucks a biscuit out of package in Simon’s hands and eats it. 

Then Simon kisses _him_. 

* * *

He hadn’t known he was going to kiss Baz until he did it - and maybe it hadn’t been a good idea to do it before he even ate a single biscuit, but it wasn’t an idea so much as something he just had to do. Baz’s mouth is full of biscuit, and he can taste it on his lips. He has a moment to appreciate the fact that he’s kissing another man, that he’s kissing Baz, specifically Baz who’s just stuck a biscuit in his mouth, and then his elbows give out and he falls back against the pillows with a surprised, “Oof!” 

Baz stares down at Simon, wide-eyed, and slowly chews and swallows his biscuit from behind the cover of his hand. 

“Should’ve waited ’til I had one of those probably,” Simon says, looking down at the snacks. 

Baz huffs a laugh, but he looks more confused than anything. He’s blushing - intensely. 

Simon takes a biscuit out of the package and eats it. He takes out another, and says around his mouthful, “Was that okay? That I kissed you?” 

“I — Yes,” Baz says. He’s frowning now, but he’s still blushing. “But I thought we were enemies.” 

Simon laughs at that. “How are we enemies? I just let you drink my blood. We haven’t been enemies in ages.” 

“Yeah.” Baz takes a shaky breath. He looks down at his hands. “You’re right.” 

When he looks back up at Simon, his eyes are dark silver, warm and smoky. One eye is lighter than the other because of the way the light on his nightstand is hitting him. He slowly leans down to Simon, giving him time to pull away or stop him. But Simon doesn’t want to. He smiles against Baz’s warm lips as they kiss again. 

* * *

They kiss again and again, one kiss turning into another, until it’s all one kiss, a hot, open-mouthed declaration without words. He holds Simon to him, telling Simon with his hands and lips how much he loves him until he’s brave enough to tell Simon in other ways. 

“Baz,” Simon sighs when they break apart. 

Baz rests his forehead against Simon’s, and smiles because he feels so warm. Simon’s hands are hot against his waist, and Simon’s chest, the tender flesh of his sides and belly is warm under Baz’s hands. He smiles because right now it feels like he’ll never be cold again, not the way he’s always been. He’s too happy, too in love, to care that he feels tears pricking at his eyes, and he releases a shaky, breathless laugh, that’s more like a sob. 

Simon lets his head fall back against the pillow so he can look Baz in the eyes. He holds Baz’s face and wipes the tears with his thumbs, then pulls Baz into his arms, holding him there and Baz lets himself hold Simon back. He pets Baz’s hair back from Baz’s head with his broad, calloused hand. 

“I’ve wanted to do that for a long time,” Baz murmurs against Simon’s chest. He’s never lifting his head again, even though he can feel Simon’s skin under his cheek getting slick with his tears. He’s not really crying anymore, the tears are just sort of leaking out. 

“Drink my blood or kiss me?” Simon says, voice rumbling under Baz’s ear. 

“Yes.” Baz smiles. 

Simon laughs quietly at that. 

They’re both quiet for a few minutes, laying in each other’s arms. Baz works an arm under Simon’s waist and Simon wriggles around to accommodate him. They fall asleep in each other’s arms. It’s deepest, sweetest sleep Baz has ever had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I had so much fun writing this fic for avenging_cap. i doubt i will be writing over 20k in a month again any time soon but it's kinda cool that i did do that. happy new years!

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I'll be updating every day (maybe 2x a day for a couple chapters) until the whole thing is posted before the 31st :) 
> 
> PS come bug me on tumblr @unseelieseelie!


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